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Typology of Character ...

Monday, July 7, 2014. What type of character are you? What is the driving image or thought in your life? Is it more the “I am a helper”? Or are you shaped by “I am successful”? Our life is driven by such kind of principle characteristics much more than we are usually aware of.

What type of Typology? …

What type of typology is the right one to describe what we happens in our mind and our heart? I have been looking into several of them over the past weeks - and it is difficult today, since there are many “philosophical” or esotheric approaches, and some from scientific psychology, but the ones from scientific psychology are mainly driven by the need to deal with very ill people - not with healthy humans in ordinary situations. And the others come with a lot of metaphysical overhead.

I decided to use the typology which is given by the so-called “Enneagram”. It gives nine main types of characters - with a description of their character role, their driving (holy) idea, their basic fear, basic desire and further phychological moments. It describes not only the driving moment, but also a temptation - that is a danger of trying to achieve the basic desire by wrong means, as well as the key driving passion linked to the role and its main virtue, which usually balances the driving passion and temptation. Let us have a look - here we only give a brief insight into four out of nine character types (following Wikipedia):

Type Characteristic role Ego fixation Holy idea Basic fear Basic desire Temptation Vice/Passion Virtue

1 Reformer Resentment Perfection Corruptness, imbalance, being bad Goodness, integrity, balance Hypocrisy, hypercriticism Anger Serenity

2 Helper Flattery (Ingratiation) Freedom, Will Being unloved To feel love Deny own needs, manipulation Pride Humility

3 Achiever Vanity Hope, Law Worthlessness To feel valuable Pushing self to always be “the best” Deceit Truthfulness, Authenticity

4 Individualist Melancholy (Fantasizing) Origin Having no identity or significance To be uniquely themselves To overuse imagination in search of self Envy Equanimity (Emotional Balance)

Typology and the Biblical Position …

What is the relationship between such a typology and the biblical viewpoint? We can definitely say that the bible describes humans as very diverse, with special gifts and skills which are given by the Lord. We find different characters in the Old Testament as well as the New Testament, and we see many of the features which all typologies describe in Jesus himself!

The bible makes one point very clear: salvation is coming from the Lord through faith in Jesus. What ever character we are - we are saved by him only, by grace through faith. He comes to us. He wants to live with us. He wants to talk to us and wants to relate to us. With God as the main point of trust in our life, we are taken in to his family. No particular behaviour will help us to reach this, it is grace only.

In this sence, character typologies can be very helpful to understand how humans react, what they do, what drives them. But they cannot be a tool towards salvation. They can only be a tool to help us to grow in faith. They can be helpful to accept other people, with diverse skills and diverse character, as full humans. People are very different - and that is good! The Lord wants us all, to come together and bring what he has given to us, to support and help each other and to live in community with him and with one another. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts