Behavioral Psychology, as we know it in the modern period, is necessarily conditioned by what Christians might call ‘natural theology,’ or what secularists might call ‘natural law.’ Psychology is grounded in ‘effect-to-cause’ symmetry, such that what we are able to observe in behavioral patterns, inter-personal dynamics, and at the broader level, societal movements, comes to be the bases by which we attempt to not only describe such patterns, but then prescribe methods for bringing remedy to those patterns that ‘seem’ deleterious to the well-being of the individual or society at large. It follows, then, that as Christians seek to provide remedies for psychological disorders, that they would attempt to integrate the discoveries of modern psychology with Christian theology and biblical teaching. It follows, in general, because within the Christian tradition, in the main, there is a broad commitment to natural theology; i.e. again, the idea of tracing effects back to their causes—whether that be more positively, tracing the effect of creation back to God; or more negatively, the effect of a psychological disorder back to its malformed genesis in the souls of a fallen people. If you hadn’t noticed, what I’m doing here is drawing an analogy between natural theological premises, and natural law premises as those relate to psychological consequents.

But the above approach seems troubling. It seems to start upon a starting point that the Gospel itself disallows. If this is the case, it seems to me, there ought be an alternative, for the Christian, that coheres with the Gospel reality itself; with the revelational and miraculous nature of the Gospel as it bespeaks God to us, and as such bespeaks us to ourselves as we come to know God, and thus ourselves, in the rightly ordered relationship that God first pre-destined for us in Christ. Karl Barth captures this paradigm well when he writes:

What we concede to the Word of God will always be an attempt to make good a claim to our own freedom, to go on believing in our own possibilities. If we imagine that we can talk out this freedom ourselves, we have already talked it in again. Our talking out, however radical (and the more radical it is the more obviously this is true), is quite unable to talk out what really has to be talked out. It is better for us to recognize our total inability in this respect, to admit to ourselves that on the basis of our own possibilities we shall always be men who require to believe in their own possibilities. The only power for this talking out is simply the power of the Word itself. In so far as we ourselves do the talking out, it is the power of the Holy Spirit. We must remember that what we have to do here is just to receive revelation as revelation. We have to see that his reception is the reception of revelation. We have to see that man is finally and actually confronted with God, with the Lord, as Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer. We have to realise that God’s revealedness for us is God’s own person and God’s own work. All the comfort, all the power, all the truth of this revealedness depends upon the fact that it is with God that we are dealing. All our understanding of this revealedness depends upon the fact that we identify it with God Himself, ruling out all other possibilities but God’s possibility. We have therefore to realise that as the recipient of revelation man is brought under God’s judgment. It is only because of this that he is brought under God’s promise. It is only because of this that God meets him as the One who intercedes for him, who undertakes and directs his cause, who does not therefore quench his own ability and will and accomplishment but subordinates it to His own, since man must always be subordinated to God, if God’s glory is to triumph and man is to be helped. We are to understand, therefore, that for God to be revealed involves the dislodging of man from the estimation of his own freedom, and his enrichment with the freedom of the children of God.[1]

If the basis for our knowing ourselves is first knowing God, then knowledge of self cannot remain an abstract venture which we come to discover by studying humankind as a species. If revelation is God’s, if God is revelation of the reality of his life—and reality as such—then the human being, in themselves, have no freedom for discovering what reality actually is outwith dependence upon God in Christ who is Lord. As Barth writes about God’s Word, “By the outpouring of the Holy Spirit it becomes possible for man in his freedom to be met by God’s revelation, because in it the Word of God becomes unavoidably his master.”[2] In other words, Christians are not their own masters; they have not been imbued, by virtue of “creation” or “nature,” with the capaciousness to arrive at right conclusions about anything; let alone themselves. Creation, and human beings as creatures, are not tabula rasa, full of potential, simply waiting to be activated and ‘perfected’ by God with the consequence of being able to engage in ‘self-discovery.’ No, the Gospel itself asserts, and proves!, just the opposite. The Gospel demonstrates that people are wayward all the way down. As such, we, by definition, are waiting for a self-determination that is outside of us (extra nos); and in this self-determination, as that is supplied for us in the vicarious humanity of Christ, shaped by the eternal Logos in consubstantial union with the Father and the Holy Spirit, we are given, and thus taught the ordered life that God pre-destined for us in His dearly beloved Son.

When I take the above and apply it towards psychology, what I arrive at is the idea that God alone has the place to ‘psychologize’ us. God alone knows what it means to be human in Christ, and in that archetypal humanity the rest of humanity finds its locus to genuinely operate, to genuinely think and love as human beings. It is only as this ‘power of resurrection’ penetrates the hearts and minds of wayward people, that we then come to have the capacity to live in a truly ordered standing before God and humankind. I take this orientation to be the ground upon which a broken and disturbed people can come to have a psychological life that is healthy and flourishing; only insofar as that, again, is confronted by the lordly reality of God in Jesus Christ; and as that reality undergirds and funds who we are as we live in and from the Revelation of Godself in Christ.

What this means for modern behavioral psychological models is that they are funded by faulty theological suppositions. They operate from a natural theological foundation that never is able to resurrect; thus, it has no ‘lasting’ or ‘eternal’ power. Christians, particularly those in the psychological discipline, ought to take this more seriously, and maybe reevaluate the foundations upon which they have built their models for engaging with the ‘interior life.’ There is an objective ground who has become the subjective ground for us in the Gospel who is the Christ.

[1] Barth, CD I/2 §16, 59-60 [emboldening mine].

[2] Ibid., 66.