I think there are physiological imbalances that can obtain in the brain wherein medication is needed in order to bring balance back (often natural remedies are more systemically effective and health-engendering than the synthetic medicines of the modern world—but that’s a tangent). But most often, I’d contest, people who struggle with “mental illnesses,” are actually dealing with some form of narcissism (I write this, of course, not as a psychiatrist, but as a theologian of little means). Martin Luther famously pressed the notion of sin as homo incurvatus in se (‘a person incurved upon oneself’). I would like to draw a correlation between what often counts as mental illness, in the 21^st century, to this notion of sin. Sin is not a mental illness, but often mental illnesses, or what are categorized as those, are a consequence of prolonged patterns of sin; prolonged and unchecked patterns of human beings navel-gazing. If human beings are created to look outside of themselves, and upward to God as the ground of their being, then it is no wonder “mental illness” is ostensibly on the rise. But I want to use this brief reflection to catapult into a methodological discussion about Christians and psychology.

Psychology, much like its master, philosophy, is a horizontal science that scans the flatlander horizon of observable data, and attempts to construct a global field of knowledge from what it ostensibly discovers within the immanent horizon found under the sun. When Christians attempt to synthesize these discoveries with the Christian reality, as if an aid to theological dogma, at a methodological level we quickly come to recognize that there is an appeal to natural theology being made. In other words, psychology relies on the prior axiom that ‘all truth is God’s truth,’ and that latent within the created order there is unrevealed and thus discoverable knowledge of the ways of God that are perspicaciously open to the natural minds of the searching men and women of the world. But this presumes too much in my estimation.

We know who God is; we know the ways of God from one source: God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In my view, Jesus Christ came that He might ‘exegete’ or explain who God is in Himself for us. If this is the ‘ground and grammar’ of all genuine knowledge of God, and His ways in creation (in a God/world relation), then how can we presume upon a prior idea that we, apart from this revelation, can know God or His ways? If we can only know the ways of God from Christ as the exhaustive revelation of God without remainder, then where does this leave natural theology (and all other modes of knowledge that are contingent upon its reality)? If who God is is only known through His Self-presentation in Christ, then there can be no other form of actual knowledge of God. George Hunsinger writes the following as he defines Barth’s understanding of ‘actualism’ and God’s presentation in Christ for the world:

“Actualism” is the motif which governs Barth’s complex conception of being and time. Being is always an event and often an act (always an act whenever an agent capable of decision is concerned). The relationship between divine being and human being is one of the most vexed topics in Barth interpretation, and one on which the essay at hand hopes to shed some light. For now let it simply be said, however cryptically, that the possibility for the human creature to act faithfully in relation to the divine creator is thought to rest entirely in the divine act, and therefore continually befalls the human creature as a miracle to be sought ever anew.[1]

If knowledge of God, and His ways, in relation to us (His creatures) is fully contingent upon the continuously Self-giving miracle of God for the world in Christ, then in what way can a natural knowledge of God be a viable option? And if a natural knowledge of God is not a viable way, then in what way can ‘Christian psychology’ deliver to us a conception of self-knowledge that is in any way accurate vis-à-vis God’s determination? If as Holy Scripture tells us, over and again, that God alone searches the depths and inner-recesses of the human heart; then in what way can psychology attempt to tell us what God alone knows? How can a science based upon purely natural and horizontal assumptions find the power of vision to peer into the human heart; and then prescribe actions for behavior and self-modification that is supposedly able to save us from ourselves?

I think: Christian psychology has arisen in the modern period as a “para” movement; a movement that operates in the absence of recognizing that the Gospel in itself (Hisself) is indeed the Power of God! And not an abstract power, like the God of potentia absoluta gives us, but a concrete power that breaks into our worlds on a moment by moment basis. And not in a generic or theoretical world of Platonic light, but the sort of world where the Savior comes and craps His diaper as a baby, and sheds His blood on a wooden cross. The Gospel is only as abstract as we presume upon it with our own faulty understandings; understandings that void the Gospel of its real penetrative transformative recreative power, and relegate it to a sort of insurance policy for a life to come (but not life now).

In my view, Christian theology, the sort that is doxological (or worship promoting), is what gives the Christian the sort of therapeuo or “therapy” that our souls are in dire need of. The sort of healing that raises the dead to life, and causes the person to finally look outside of themselves (extra nos); and to the ground and telos (purpose) of what their whole being has always already been intended for since the beginning: i.e. to be in a right relationship with the Creator who is Father of the Son in the bond of union provided for by the Holy Spirit. God alone knows our heart, the very source of who we are; and He has pronounced a judgment on it. His judgment is that it required ‘divine blood’ (Acts 20.28) to be shed, in order to bring life where there was (and is) only death. This is the prescription that comes with the description in hand. In other words, the incarnation of God in Christ, and the atoning work therefrom, tells us that the depth of sin and the human heart are too great for horizontal knowledge to handle. It tells us that God alone is the answer to our deepest problems, no matter how the profane world wants to label such things; and that His power in Christ alone has the capacity to break this inveterate urge to look inward to the abyss of ourselves instead of the bounty of God’s Triune Life.

In light of this I can only counsel the many Christians who are still under the spell of ‘Christian psychology’ to abandon any hope of finding real answers about the human heart therein. Scientism has penetrated the psyches of the evangelical Christian sub-culture; as such the sciences (soft or hard) have been given too much weight in regard to identifying what the actual human predicament is. We displace God’s pronouncement about us, and His prescription in Christ, when we attempt to “supplement” that pronouncement with modes of knowledge that have no real access into the Holy of Holies of God’s Triune Life. I take psychology to be an attempt to access what God alone knows; and as such it attempts to draw causal connections between observable human behaviors, and their source in the inner-human. Again, God alone knows the depths of human sin (which is what constitutes the inner-human orientation apart from Christ), and as such He alone has the power to actuate what psychology only pretends to have facility for. There is no depth dimension, by definition, within the discipline of psychology; it is merely a horizontal attempt to access what can only be accessed by the vertical penetration of God into the world in Christ.

[1] George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16-18.