Evangelical Reformation

I hope you caught the difference in this title from the last one. The last posting, “Psychology Isn’t Cosmology,” made the point that psychology does not deal with far away abstract issues that take billions of years to trickle down to our daily lives. Psychology hits us where we live.

Nor is psychology cosmetology. If beauty is just skin deep, the work of the cosmetologist isn’t even that profound. It deals with life at its most superficial level. By way of contrast, psychology deals with the inner workings of the human being—matters such as our values, morals, heart, thought-life, relationships, emotions, and other salient issues of life. In fact, as we have before asserted, it deals with many of the same issues addressed in Scripture.

That reality makes it so very crucial to know what we are ingesting before taking in psychological concepts. If you work with plants, you make get dirt all over your hands, even dirt that in part is manure. But that is no problem. When you are done you wash it off. However, to eat that stuff would be a big problem. Why? Because in gardening it only reaches us at a superficial level, but in eating it, it goes into our inner being, were we are far more vulnerable. Likewise with psychological concepts.

For example, many, if not most, psychologists would tell us that self-esteem is healthy, specifically indicating that we should esteem ourselves just as we are—not based on performance. That concept reaches into the core of our being. It asserts that at least a significant aspect of our focus should be on ourselves. It further encourages us to overlook our sinfulness, our failures, our limitations, and “feel good about me just because I am me.”

But what if in buying into this teaching, as many, if not most evangelicals have, we are ingesting psychological manure? What if an inward focus is not really the solution to our problems but the cause? What if by feeling good about ourselves just as we are, we are suppressing genuine guilt that is identifying issues in our life that need to be changed? Or worse, what if we are suppressing the ministry of the Holy Spirit that is seeking to lead us to repentance? Or what if by ignoring our failures and limitations we are promoting a false view of self that will ultimately lead us to wrong and destructive decisions? Or what if self-esteem isn’t the kind of self-love Jesus had in mind when He commanded us to love our neighbor as ourselves? And what if self-esteem, rather than encouraging us to love our neighbor instead inclines us toward selfishness? And what if in a marriage two people esteeming themselves really does not provide a solid foundation for a good relationship but a swamp of self-centeredness that has contributed substantially to the divorce culture found in both society and evangelical societies?

However you might answer these questions, the point is that the concepts of psychology penetrate to the core of our being. Not only do they, as noted in the previous post, apply their molding power to the practical issues of life, causing an immediate effect, but also they apply them to heart issues, causing a profound effect.

Therefore, a casual “Jesus called us to love neighbor as self; therefore, we need to love self before we can love our neighbor,” does not constitute sufficient analysis to ingest a concept that could be poison. Ideas affecting the profound aspects of life require profound analysis before including them on our menu. There is reason to believe that the FDA is far more thorough than evangelical theologians. Is our stomach really that much more important than our heart?

Every once in a while I enjoy reading something on cosmology. For example, late breaking news (since cosmology speaks in billions of years, late breaking could refer to a few thousand years ago, but this one happened to be released on 16 Mar 2005) indicates that “large scale ripples in space-time could explain the observations of the accelerating Universe that seem to require dark energy – the vacuum energy density that is equivalent to the cosmological constant.” Now that you know that, your life will never be the same.

Now I understand that sooner or later my cosmological beliefs will trickle down into daily life. However, speculations on negative matter that forms alternative universes is a long way off from how well I get along with my wife and kids today.

Psychology is not.

Take the anger issue, for example. The options of viewing our anger as sin to be dealt with through the exercise of spiritual disciplines or viewing it as a product of our unconscious that has been shaped by our past experience over which we have no control will have an immediate impact on our relationships. If the angry person is truly a victim of his past and the exercise of spiritual disciplines will not resolve the problem, the person will become defeated and frustrated by efforts to resolve the anger problem using spiritual resources, and his family and others in his sphere of influence will suffer. On the other hand, if the effective way to deal with anger is through the application of spiritual resources, and the individual, rather than taking responsibility for his problem and applying those resources, places his trust, energies, and money in an ineffective psychotherapeutic process, the results will likewise be disastrous.

This is just one of multitudes of ways in which choosing psychology over Scripture can have an immediate and significant impact on our lives. Can depression and anxiety be successfully treated using spiritual approaches or should the person struggling in these areas take medication? Will conveying unconditional acceptance to a child doing drugs—or overeating or failing in school or …—result in a positive change in his behavior, or will this just reinforce his negative behavior as our intuition might tell us (“If I’m okay doing drugs, why change?”)?

One reason that it is vitally important for evangelicals to determine the truth about psychology—is it biblical and is it effective—is because it deals with us where we live, and therefore it has an immediate impact. It will affect attitudes, values, behaviors, relationships, emotions, and all of the aspects of our lives closest to our hearts—and oh yes, our hearts, too.

So, if you are struggling with whether the big bang is compatible with Scripture, I hope you find the answer. But it will take several billion years before your wife and kids care. The big bang they are concerned about is the one that occurs when the kids have left their toys all over the living room floor. An accurate understanding of the relationship of Scripture and psychology can have a cosmic impact on those relationships—today.

Many years ago, my Dad paid a visit to Dr. Glocker, the family doctor. During the course of the appointment he made the mistake of mentioning that he had been to a chiropractor for help with his ailment. Dr. Glocker proceeded to ask if there were chiropractors for animals. My Dad replied that he had never heard of any. Dr. Glocker responded, “That’s because your dog has more sense than you do.”

I don’t share Dr. Glocker’s disdain for chiropractors. I have received help from both chiropractors and medical doctors. I mention this story to make the point that where two disciplines share the same turf, there tends to be hostility. The reason may be purely selfish, with each discipline wanting the turf for itself. However, these negative attitudes may stem from a nobler concern. Each discipline comes to the field with a different perspective, a different worldview. Therefore, each is concerned that the other discipline is misleading the public and, as a result, causing unneeded confusion and suffering.

So it is with biblical Christianity and psychology. Both vie for the same turf. I mentioned earlier that psychology has become a secular religion in our society, dealing with many of the issues previously considered to be in the realm of the church. Think, for example, of the various aspects of the fruit of the Spirit such as love, joy, and peace. Both Christianity and psychology promise these commodities. Both offer help with relationships. Both deal with behavioral issues such as intemperate eating and drinking. Both offer help at times of tragedy and death.

Not only does psychology seek to occupy the same turf as biblical Christianity, but its solutions flow out of a different, often diametrically opposite, worldview. For example, the psychologist whose ideas hold the greatest sway over evangelical thinking is Carl Rogers. Rogers’ approach to therapy has unconditional acceptance and self-esteem as its focal points, two concepts that have risen to prominence in evangelical thinking across the past several decades. Rogers was selected as humanist of the year in 1964. It would seem that trying to blend the views of such a thoroughgoing humanist with those of biblical Christianity would be like seeking to mix oil and water.

This is not to suggest that all psychological concepts are incompatible with biblical Christianity or even that ideas coming from a foreign worldview might not fit into an evangelical perspective. It is of interest that in recent years medical doctors and chiropractors have seemed to gain a little more appreciation for each other. Likewise, careful analysis of various psychological concepts may prove some of them to be compatible with evangelical Christianity and helpful to the believer.

However, ideas coming from such diverse sources call for serious scrutiny. The medical profession may adopt the use of acupuncture, but we can be sure that they would do careful research before embracing a procedure so foreign to the scientific orientation of medicine. Likewise, it is essential that careful analysis be done to determine if psychological concepts are compatible with the biblical orientation of the evangelical Christianity. The question of whether this analysis has been done will be the topic of a future post.