Category Archives: Theo-Psychology

Christian Reductionism and the Fatalization of the Christian Life

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Christian reductionism has probably produced more spiritual fatalities than anything else. The way I define Christian reductionism (CR) is in this way: Christian reductionism is when professing Christians come to think, typically subconsciously, that they have arrived. That they have come to experience the pinnacles of Christianity in their daily and mundane experiences, even as those might entail “mountain top experiences,” and extrapolate from there that there is nothing more. Often, subsequent to this type of reasoning, people attempt to live within the formalism of the way that Christianity has been snapshotted for them in their own experience, but ultimately come to lose interest in the Christian life (inwardly). This loss of interest, under the terms of CR that I am currently defining, pivots on the individual’s belief that they have already exhausted the depths and heights of Christianity, of the Gospel reality, at which point they see no more space for growth (even though they wouldn’t admit it). Following, a fatalistic attitude towards the Gospel comes to consume their lives, and they begin the process of compartmentalizing their Christian life into a banality of just one piece of their daily existences, knowing that they at least are probably on their way to Heaven, and simply settle-in for the long haul (or the shorter haul, as the case may be).

Sadly, they have believed a lie. For the CRs the broader society, the cultural upheavals and underheavals, daily life, the perceived wins and losses, simply become apiece with what they believe the Christian life to be; just one more aspect of what it means to be alive. Sadly, they have believed a lie. They have become participants in a Folk Religion, rather than in the faith of Christ. But I don’t think it is a stretch to say that this type of religion is the dominant undercurrent of what makes up most of Western Christianity today in the 21st century.

The Gospel is radical. And it requires effort, spiritual battle, recognition, a fight, and an unwillingness to allow oneself to reduce the Gospel to one’s own parochial rendition of it. The Gospel life is charged through with the energy of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ Himself. It surely has a sobriety to it, but the sobriety of a stately Lion laying around in his domain on the Masai Mara. PS. Of course, when I say it requires effort etc., what I’m referring to is living the Christian life, not becoming a Christian or coming into the family of God in Christ. Living the Christian life requires effort though.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord. -I Corinthians 15.58

Suicide as Self-Deicide, A Theological Thought

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Barth in his continuing development of a Christian Ethic, in this section, has been discussing self-power versus real power, which is God’s. In this development he has arrived at a discussion on suicide. He is taking self-power, in abstraction from God’s power, to entail a pseudo-power (self-power), and reducing it to its logical conclusion; which ironically, is at the heights of illogicality. He refers to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thinking on this, even as Barth goes on to paraphrase Bonhoeffer’s position.[1]

To the best of my knowledge, the Ethik of D. Bonhoeffer (1949, 111–116) gives us the most cautious statement so far written on this matter. We cannot expect every man at every moment to know from his own experience the meaning of real affliction and assault, “when we are in the greatest distress and do not know which way to turn.” A man assailed and afflicted is hid from all others and sometimes even from himself. He is alone with God, and tortured by the terrible question whether God is really with him and for him, or whether he must regard himself as an atheist, i.e., a man who God has rejected and abandoned. Many theologians and theological moralists do not in practice know properly what affliction is because exegetically, dogmatically and even pastorally they know only too well in theory. In all cases, however, suicide is consciously or unconsciously this final assault and affliction. Even the most confirmed theological moralist ought to see this, and therefore to remember that perhaps he does not finally now what takes place between God and the suicide, nor therefore what is the decision which drives him to this dubious act. Is he really a self-murderer? A readiness to recognise that he may not have been a self-murderer at all is required of all who know what it is to be assailed and afflicted, even if only in theory.[2]

So, a twist. Indeed, suicide represents a complexity. In order to actually go through with a suicide a person must be at such a point of travail, by whatever antecedent and present circumstances, that it seems like the only choice left; the one last choice to take control in the midst of the utter chaos, pain, tribulation of whatever the moment is presenting the person with, and end it all (at least on the side where the visibly and physically seen predominates). I have been at these points myself; whether that be in the years long spiritual battle I had with anxiety, depression, dark nights of the soul; or whether that be at the tail end of my incurable/terminal cancer treatment (being so worn down, in so much pain, that it was starting to seem like “ending it all” might be the way out).

Conversely, as Barth paraphrases and riffs Bonhoeffer, even though it starts to become understandable why someone might feel the ultimate desperation of ending it all, even so, this remains a matter of self-power. It is an appeal to the body of death we inhabit to muster all of its resources and conjure up a solution to the desperation; particularly in the absence of that, in regard to the pastors, the doctors, the psychologists, psychiatrists, so on and so forth. Our frames are but dust, and God in Christ knows that, even experientially; and at heights we cannot begin to imagine. And yet, there are seasons of life when God seems utterly absent, as if he has left us alone to travail the path without the Light of His Lamp for us. And again, like Job, it is at this point that we have come to despair of existence itself. Job’s resolve, even in the face of “curse God and die,” was “though You slay me, yet shall I praise You.” This is the resource, beyond our bodies of death, that God in Christ alone provides for us. It is as we come to realize that we are genuinely participatio Christi, that we are constantly being given over to Christ’s death for us, that the mortal members of our bodies might exemplify Christ’s body in us, that we can have the Jobian resolve. Even so, it is as if we are merely hanging on at that point. The enemy of our souls keeps pushing us to refer to the resource and reserve of our bodies of death, which, as we have noted, concludes in suicide. It is only when we have bought the lie of Deicide, that suicide seems to be the final solution for our personal and individual existences. When we have self-deified, and concluded that the body of death we inhabit, these dusty apparatuses, in the face of tribulation and despair, that the only way forward is self-deicide (as if our body of death is ultimately the only real deity left to turn to).

[1] It isn’t often that you get a Barth paraphrase on Bonhoeffer.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §55 [404] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 77.

A Critique of John MacArthur’s ‘Word Faith Theology’: On the Relationship Between Five Point Calvinism and Human Psychology

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I work the graveyard shift at work. I have a work vehicle I drive around in all night. And so, I often will listen to Christian radio. The lineup of pastors they have preaching throughout the night includes John MacArthur’s Grace To You broadcast. The broadcast for January 6th, 2023 was a sermon MacArthur originally delivered back in 1989. The sermon title is: Spiritual Stability, Part 3: Humility and Faith—Phil. 4:5-6a. So, he’s clearly going to be discussing anxiety, and its cure by trusting and resting in Christ. And absolutely, the Lord, as we humbly and boldly come to His throne room of grace, is always ready and present to be with us, especially as we walk through the fire and deep waters of life; after all, the Christian God is the cruciform God. Because of this MacArthur, rightly, is critical of secular humanism, and an aspect of its religion: i.e., psychology. What he would be referring to is the type of therapeutic self-helpism that our ‘secular age’ has turned to as its way of coping with life; a way that isn’t a turn out to Jesus Christ, but a way that is corollary with the fallen self: the homo incurvatus in se. I agree, generally speaking, that many of the anxieties people deal with are self-generated, and end up being because the person only pushes deeper into themselves rather than flying higher out of themselves as they look to Christ, and receive, ecstatically, His life as theirs, moment-by-moment.

And yet, MacArthur is sloppy. He lumps “behavioral” generated anxieties in with anxiety in general. He engages in a sweeping generalization in his discussion on anxiety and depression (and other ailments). He doesn’t account for the physiological processes, the biological lacuna that might be present in some individuals. In other words, he doesn’t leave space for certain psychological issues to be related to actual medical deficiencies a person is born with; and this, indeed, because of the fallen bodies we inherit as a fallen humanity. That is to say, he doesn’t seem to recognize that there are people who lack the capacity to release adequate levels of serotonin in their brains, which, by God’s design, allows people to more readily operate at a ‘normal’ or base level of biological and human functionality. There are masses of people, Christian people included, who suffer with what is called MTHFR (I am one of them); this condition contributes to an inability to biologically produce the levels of serotonin the brain needs to function at a normal level. It is no different than someone who, say, suffers from an overly active histamine production in their bodies (I am also one of them). As a result, in order to quench the over-active histamine production some of us have to take not just anti-histamines, but also histamine-blockers, in order to avoid constant sinus and other respiratory infections and disorders. As corollary, people who suffer from MTHFR (this is just one example), or other biological and physiological lacunas, might need medical support in order to allow the brain to operate at a normal baseline level. Without this type of intervention, the consequences can be dire; as dire as suicide, or simply living with overwhelming anxiety and panic attacks (along with depression). I have lived with an ‘anxiety disorder’ for at least thirty years. The Lord has been gracious to me, and brought me through untold terror and misery; I don’t even understand how. And yet, He never ‘cured’ me of the physiological source standing behind all of this. And so, I have had seasons, over the years, of various anxiety and panic attacks that can be debilitating (almost). In light of that, here’s part of the transcript of MacArthur’s sermon noted above:

Now, let me tell you something, folks.  The Lord is near and this is the Lord who is near, the capable God of the Scripture, and if you will delight yourself in Him and if you will meditate on His law day and night, on His Word day and night, you will then know the God that He is, and you will know how He acts, and that will be the source of your own confidence.

Now, what is the result of knowing the Lord is near?  “Be anxious for” – what? – “nothing.”  What am I going to be worrying about?  Something God can’t handle?  Wait a minute, that’s blasphemy.  If you fret, worry, are in trauma, are unstable, if you launch off into everything from anorexia to schizophrenia and all kinds of things, you are really saying, “I can’t cope with life.  I can’t handle life.”  And if you – whatever mechanism you use to manifest that inability, the real demonstration – and I want to say this with love and graciousness – the real underlying demonstration is you really don’t trust whom?  God.

That’s a form of blasphemy.  Two ways.  One, if you imagine that God can’t help you, then you have created a god other than the true God, and that’s blasphemy.  You have created a god who is not God.  Two, if you believe that God could help you but won’t, that’s blasphemy, too, because you’re questioning not His character but His integrity and His Word.  So the key to a stable, firmly planted life – back to Psalm 1 – is to be delighting in the Lord – I delight in who He is – and meditating on His law, I become very familiar with how He acts.  And as I understand who He is and how He acts, I can look at my life and say, “That’s the one who’s near, this is who He is, this is how He acts; I’m not going to worry.”  And again I go back to what I said:  The great weakness of the Christian church today is a lack of understanding about who God is and how God acts.  They do not understand the majesty of His wonderful attributes, and that is why we have such wholesale instability.  Because we do not know God, we do not trust God to act consistently with His revealed character and His revealed history of acts.

So what do we do?  In the church, we’ve got all these unstable people with all their problems.  Instead of giving them God and His character and His attributes and the history of how He functions and how He acts and the amazing integrity of all of His acts, we try to give clever human solutions to the instability, which in the long run projects that instability into a way of life and gives no solution at all.

In the last generation, A. W. Pink in his book Gleanings in the Godhead wrote, “The God of this century no more resembles the sovereign of holy writ than does the dim flickering of a candle resemble the glory of the mid-day sun.  The God who is talked about in the average pulpit, spoken of in the ordinary Sunday school class, and mentioned in so much of the religious literature of the day and preached in most of the so-called Bible conferences, is a figment of human imagination and invention of maudlin sentimentality,” end quote.

We aren’t even giving people a knowledge of the true God in His character and His works.  As a result, there is a tremendous lack of confidence in Him.  No wonder people have guilt, fear, and anxiety, have an inadequate knowledge of God and an inadequate trust in God – both are blasphemous.  If you imagine God to be other than He is, that’s an idol, that’s blasphemy.  If you imagine God to do other than what is consistent with His own character and promise to His people, that, too, is blasphemy; it questions His integrity.  And instead of teaching God and getting people into the Word of God, most churches are trying to patch up the unstable by giving them human solutions and worst of all, psychology, of which even psychologists say it has no answers.[1]

In general, do I believe that knowing who God is, more accurately, meditating on Scripture, deeply, can assuage the most anxious minds and hearts of deep anxiety and depression? Absolutely! But that said, this does not account for the actual medical/physiological aspects that we as a fallen people are often strapped with, by no choice of our own. I have seen the Lord intervene on my behalf a thousand times over, over the last thirty years and more! But He hasn’t ‘healed me,’ per se, of the underlying physiological source that stands behind so much of the angst and hell I’ve walked through. He has formed and shaped me in certain distinct ways through the forging fires of many deep waters, but He hasn’t healed me. More recently I have been confronted with another season of deep anxiety and panic, of an irrational sort (the fear behind it). It has been as if this time the Lord has said it’s enough, and has led me to seeking a medical support (one I should’ve done thirty years ago, but the Christian subculture, along with the secular, had so stigmatized that type of medical support, that it didn’t seem like a viable option). This time, it is as if the Lord is saying it is time to deal with this in a different way, so I can work through you in a different way. Just as with my terminal cancer diagnosis back in 2009. The Lord ultimately, and miraculously healed me, but not till after going through a hellish medical protocol that literally almost killed me multiple times. He could have foregone that, and simply healed me miraculously from the get-go. Instead He chose that I walk through a fire, that He would see me through; and He decided that He would work through the medical route, with the scars and trauma to the body in tow. Similarly, it seems this time He is using a medical route to finally provide the support I have needed for decades, in regard to helping with my MTHFR and the physiological lack that has produced in regard to a balanced brain functionality. For me, my anxiety and panic hasn’t been a matter of not knowing who God is, not meditating on Scripture (which I’ve read through fifty times, memorized books of, prayed through, so on and so forth); for me it has been a physiological issue, that indeed becomes a hook for a spiritual attack, which the Enemy will exploit, and attempt to use, in order to destroy me (and those with similar physical makeup). And so, this time the Lord has seen fit to bring me to the point of recognizing that it is time to make a medical move.

I share part of my story only to illustrate how MacArthur’s sermon fails to be sensitive to the general population out there. All anxiety and panic, and other ailments, aren’t simply a matter of not trusting the Lord enough. The ironic implication of this, if MacArthur followed his logic through, would land MacArthur in the Word Faith tribe. This is ironic because MacArthur is a vocal critic (as he should be) of such “theology.” And yet that is exactly the implication of what he is saying: i.e., that if you have enough faith you’re going to necessarily be a stable well-balanced individual. Ironically, again, this thinking pushes the person deeper into introspection, and thus deeper into the abyss God in Christ came to save the person from.

MacArthur’s approach is corollary with his prior theological commitments, and ironically, his respective doctrine of God. He broadly receives what in Puritan times was known as experimental predestinarianism. This doctrine is adjunct to a doctrine of predestination, election/reprobation, wherein God decrees that a certain number of individuals are elect, and the others are reprobate (whether actively or passively). In order for the elect to know they are elect, subsequent to God’s absolute decree (decretum absolutum), the person engages in a lifetime of ‘experimentation’ to see if they have enough good works, or enough fruit of the Spirit to determine whether or not they are indeed one of the elect of God, or maybe they only appear to be that, and end up having a ‘temporary faith’; thus being one of the reprobate. This thrusts the person into a mode and lifestyle of performance and introspection that could cause the deepest types of anxieties and depressions. Indeed, someone who lived under this teaching in the Puritan days, a man named, Humphrey Mills, wrote of his despair, that is until he was relieved of this teaching through the correction pastor and theologian, Richard Sibbes brought to him:

I was for three years together wounded for sins, and under a sense of my corruptions, which were many; and I followed sermons, pursuing the means, and was constant in duties and doing: looking for Heaven that way. And then I was so precise for outward formalities, that I censured all to be reprobates, that wore their hair anything long, and not short above the ears; or that wore great ruffs, and gorgets, or fashions, and follies. But yet I was distracted in my mind, wounded in conscience, and wept often and bitterly, and prayed earnestly, but yet had no comfort, till I heard that sweet saint . . . Doctor Sibbs, by whose means and ministry I was brought to peace and joy in my spirit. His sweet soul-melting Gospel-sermons won my heart and refreshed me much, for by him I saw and had muchof God and was confident in Christ, and could overlook the world . . . My heart held firm and resolved and my desires all heaven-ward.[2]

MacArthur’s soteriology is of a species with the type that Humphrey Mills languished under for years; that is until he was presented with a more accurate way of the Gospel by Richard Sibbes. It is a performance based, highly introspective ‘Gospel’ wherein a person becomes swamped by their own failures and bruises, such that the abstract subject becomes overwhelmed by their own inadequacies and “traumas.” The irony of this, again, is that MacArthur et al. push people into a “self-help” type of the Gospel precisely because of their inadequate doctrine of God.

The genuine Gospel does not push a person to introspection and performance based living, wherein a contract is achieved (as in Federal theology). The genuine Gospel recognizes that all of humanity is born in a helpless status, and always already inhabits that status, every day they inhabit the fallen bodies of death they were born with (cf. Rom. 7). As such, our only hope is to look to God in Christ, and His performance therein, moment-by-moment, and understand that He alone, Grace as He is, is the one who vicariously stands in our stead, lives our life for us, as He is the ground and reality of all human life in His archetypal humanity. This is our hope! And it is a dynamic organic hope that is ongoing. It isn’t some static thing of the past (MacArthur’s doctrine) that the human person is supposed to somehow emulate through self-performance and exemplar modulation. No, the Gospel is living and active, and is currently grounded by the One seated at the Right Hand of the Father, where He continuously makes intercession for each and every one of us; those of us united to Him spiritually by the Holy Spirit.

MacArthur, if anything, is consistent with his commitment to an abstract notion of a God-world relation. Not only does this impact his soteriology, but it equally implicates his thinking on matters like we have been touching upon throughout this article. At base, if your idea of a God-world relation is grounded in the idea that God relates to the world, as a matter of structure, through an abstract decree, rather than in the concrete of His life for us in Jesus Christ, then you will end up with a performance-based Christianity, through and through, which will affect the way you not only exegete Scripture, but culture at large. This article is intended to be an example of how a bad doctrine of God (such as MacArthur’s) leads to other bad fruit in regard to the way things get generalized, and thus communicated to the body of Christ writ large. The consequences of this can literally be deadly; not just eternally, but here and now. A baby Christian, who struggles say with MTHFR, who comes into MacArthur’s church, and hears the above the sermon, might think they are in sin for taking an SSRI (or whatever is suited for the particular brain deficiency to function more properly), stop taking it, be thrust into a world of overwhelming fear and anxiety (because of a physiological problem), and commit suicide. This is the type of dire consequences MacArthur’s theology could potentially have in the life of those who might be the most bruised among us. And this is why I am writing this post, as a censure, once again, of the type of bad theology MacArthur et al. promote.

[1] John MacArthur, Spiritual Stability, Part 3: Humility and Faith—Phil. 4:5-6a, accessed 01-07-2023.

[2] Ron Frost, The Devoted Life: An Invitation to the Puritan Classics, citing, John Rogers, Ohel or Bethshemesh, A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, n.p., 1653).

The Therapeutic Christian: Against Monsters, Demons, and Dark Souls

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The Prophet, Jeremiah famously wrote the following: “’The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? (Jer. 17:9)” Modern Christians will read things like this, give it a head-nod, and not think much about it in concrete personal ways. The Apostle Paul wrote the following:

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. (Eph. 4:17-19)

Both Jeremiah and Paul are affirming what the cross of Jesus Christ reveals in depth; that is, that humanity’s fallen incurved heart is depraved beyond all imagination; depraved so deeply that it took the eternal God to become human in Jesus Christ to put it to death, for each person, personally. And yet, for some reason most modern [even “conservative”] Christians don’t really believe this, not in practice. In the main, modern Christians operate like what Jesus did only has purchase for their place in heaven, something like ‘fire-insurance.’ In other words, we have this pervasive ‘moralistic-therapeutic-deism’ run-amok among most of the evangelical churches, operating as if the massa of humanity is mostly good. They operate as if world-leaders, entertainers, and most people in general have good intentions at heart. But this fatly contradicts the reality of the cruciformed Gospel. The cross says that people aren’t inherently good, but instead, inherently evil. Not just in theory, but concretely. And yet Christians, in the main, have so-called ‘social-imaginaries’ that ‘buffer’ them from actually believing what the Gospel presupposes: ie that human beings in their unchecked fallen hearts are deleteriously evil all the way down. People in general, and Christians in particular, don’t want to imagine that people really are all that bad, and so along with the world, they attribute evil actions of people to psychiatric problems; or maybe they’ll allow for the idea that someone’s ‘family-of-origin’ (again more psych categorization), ie nurture not nature, has led a person to do evil things.

Why do so many modern Christians act as if the reality of the Gospel, and its full attestation in the total canon of Scripture, really is just an artifact of history? Why do they operate as if the world of demons, monsters, and dark souls is a primitive relic of a past superstition that has now been transcended by the turn-to-the-modern? Why do Christians, even if they intellectually know about the impact of Enlightenment categories on the Christian imagination, still operate as if the “primitive” datum of Holy Scripture has been transcended by human reason, and the dawn of the scientific revolution? Charles Taylor provides insight into how the Christian mind has come to function in the 21st century, as if in opposition to the Gospel it claims to be submissive to:

What made Christianity particularly repulsive to the Enlightenment mind was the whole juridical-penal way in which the doctrine of original sin and the atonement were cast during the high middle ages and the Reformation. Our distance from perfection was glossed as just punishment for earlier sin; and our salvation through Christ as his offering satisfaction for this fault, paying the fine, as it were.

There were some repugnant aspects of this just in itself. But it became connected to two doctrines which were potentially deeply offensive. The first was the belief that only a few are saved. The second was the doctrine of predestination, which seemed to be generated inevitably from a belief in divine omnipotence in the context of the juridical-penal model.

Now in fact, opinion begins to move against these doctrines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, there is the “decline of hell”, and the rise of universalism; on the other, there is growing revulsion at predestined damnation, even within Calvinistic societies. Of course, these developments were surely not independent of the one I was tracing above, viz., the growth of confidence in the human power to do good. But they add an extra level of motivation, a revulsion at the orthodox formulations, which must either lead to a revised faith, or in certain cases, to a sharp break with it.

Again, as confidence in human powers grows, and in particular, in the powers of reason, the claims of Churches to authority on behalf of a faith which partly consists of mysteries, becomes harder and harder to accept. This is another way in which a modern rationalism based on science can argue that the rise of science refutes religion.

But this still doesn’t capture fully the negative movement, the hostility to Christianity which spread among elites at this time. It wasn’t just the particular doctrines of the juridical-penal model, nor the rationalist rejection of mystery.

We saw that much of the historical practice of Christianity ran afoul of the new ethic of purely immanent human good: . . .1

For those who have studied the history of ideas this isn’t new information. But then I scratch my head: because even many people who know the history of ideas still operate as if modern humans have ‘come of age’ and transcended our primitive pre-critical past. We’re more comfortable with attributing what used to be considered demon-possession to psychiatric problems. Once the world of actual sin, evil, and the devil are smudged away as if a footnote of intellectual history, the modern Christian, along with their pagan counterparts, give way to the seduction of the materialistic and thus therapeutic world. As modern Christians we feel free to reduce everything to a physicalist explanation, leaving the ‘world’ of the Bible in the dustbin of history.

As a result, many modern Christians, cannot, will not imagine that our dear leaders just might have evil intentions inspiring what they do. After all, post-Enlightenment, any respectable person knows that humanity has the generative power within itself to be either good or bad; and given Romantic categories, clearly most people are inherently good, or so the imagination goes. This is the belief that seems to pervade our species currently. It surely has realized universalistic premises behind it; ie the idea that Christ has so objectively turned humanity back to God, that humanity indeed, and in general, operates with God-like attributes. This seems to be the ethos that currently dominates the mainstream evangelical-mind. It is an ethos that looks nothing like the biblical revelation as that comes in the Theanthropos, the Godman, Jesus Christ.

People, by definition, are drunk on their own self-driven-wanderlust. That’s what the kerygmatic reality demonstrates; that’s what the stauro-logic (cross-logic) demands. And yet modern Christians carry-on on their merry way as if most people really are good when it comes right down to it. But that thinking doesn’t come from the Gospel, it comes from the elevation of human reason to the point that it comes to think itself smarter and wiser than God. The Enlightenment only took humanity full circle, with some technological and scientific advancement, such that humanity believes itself to be beyond the mythos of Holy Writ. I’m left wondering if when Jesus comes again, and He surely will, if He really will find faith on earth; He wondered the same. I’m rather skeptical about that at this point.

 

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2007), 262-63 kindle.

 

A Word Against the Christian Psychology Sub-Culture and the ‘Natural Theology’ It Springs From

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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 21st 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.

God As Psychologist Par Excellence: Thinking Constructively About Psychology and TheoAnthropology

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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.