The attitude and tasks of Christian Psychology
August 13th, 2007After having introduced our organization IGNIS a bit last week, I want to start to share some of our basic insights on Christian Psychology (CP) with the focus on a reflection on the attitudes and tasks of a CP in this and the necessity of a CP in the next blog.
What is a CP? You might be surprised that the first core statement would be that in its essence it is not a program, a teachable technique, but rather the expression of an attitude or even virtue. More than a procedure, a technical definition, CP is defined by the people doing it, by their hearts firmly dedicated to the aim of finding a real Christian way of developing a psychology, of working practically in its fields, a way that really reflects Christ, His understanding of and purpose for man, a way that comes as close as possible to the kind of psychology we find in the heart of God for His people. And so we teach our students that it’s not primarily up to learning all the concepts, but that we want to help them become “living letters” for the cause of Christ in psychology. We want to help them develop spiritual and relational competence. A heart on its way of trusting Christ ever deeper, a love for His people and involvement in His body, a humble attitude and readiness to heed to correction personally as well as regarding one’s development for CP, the heart knowledge that God never gives the full truth to one individual, but to communities, a deeply rooted identity that doesn’t strive for one’s own professional honor, but for God’s glory – these are only a few of the virtues a promoter of CP should possess (in part) and be longing to grow into increasingly.
I know, one might argue, that what I have articulated should be true for every Christian, for everybody working in the field of theology and psychology in the broadest sense. Surely true, and we would never boast it as being something CP people fully possess or possess more than others or even possess solely. But yet this is such an important point to stress first, to not indulge into all that conceptual stuff right away. How good could a CP get, when we are only focused on that level, when we put all our effort into building constantly better models without giving the first place to what is most important? CP is an expression of virtue – this must be a central part of the definition – and this being true in the life of a CP will influence everything coming thereafter.
And of course there is room for the conceptual part of the job. And here CP is a unique school of thought, a new psychological and psychotherapeutic paradigm built on a biblical understanding of world and man. Three main tasks can be ascribed towards a CP:
1. Working on a biblical world view foundation
2. Own empirical research
3. Integration or better reconceptualization of secular and Christian models
1. A main task of CP will be the study of the Bible for insight on man’s psychological reality and the development of a thorough understanding of our biblical world view assumption (esp. important as a framework for the evaluation of the usefulness of models for a CP in step 3). We will have to ask and offer our version of the answer to questions regarding the essence of mankind (monism/dualism; freedom; core ethical rationales etc.), the essence of destruction [pathology] and healing and its promoting factors, the essence of being a self (substantial/relational ontology; natural law driven or voluntarism etc.) and the essence of knowledge, its goals and procedures and many more.
2. Of course we will also do empirical research. But we will do that along the lines of the epistemological core insights we get out of step 1. We will approach the world as God’s general revelation in an attitude Anselm of Canterbury called “credo ut intelligam”, we will interpret the data by our biblical spectacles as Calvin put it.
We will allow our biblical epistemological insights to influence our methodology. We will, for example, take serious that the Bible calls mere head knowledge without fruit in the life of a person something of no value. We will take into account the consequences that the Bible would consider a research on love null and void, a mere vanity, unless the researcher’s life is changed, drawn to a larger capacity to love and caring. We will take that serious and look for new methodological ways to include the person of the researcher inside the scope of the study in that sense.
3. And we will reflect on the models of others, Christian (church history as well as modern versions) and Non-Christians in respect to their usefulness for a CP. We will not underestimate creation grace, tearing to the ground the work, effort and stretching out of those that have not found Jesus yet, but we will consider their work with respect. But we will on the other hand remain in an attitude of a balance of trust and suspicion, knowing about the noetic effects of sin, knowing how wrong world view assumptions will distort obtaining knowledge. Therefore we will promote a very thorough evaluation process, evaluating how the original impulse or idea will be changed when now viewed in light of the biblical framework, what kind of sense it makes in a biblical concept of reality – a process we call reconceptualization of reconstruction in Germany.
We usually find three steps helpful in this process:
a. Understanding prior to evaluation: we first try to understand the secular model thoroughly
b. World view comparison: we look for the models underlying world view assumptions and compare these with the related biblical truth
c. Process of reconceptualization: we find out what sense the original idea makes within the biblical framework
August 16th, 2007 at 6:03 am
Kathrin,
Indeed it is exciting to discovere that you have been practicing, and reflecting on, Christian psychology in a different part of the world!
I’m thus curious: which books — apart from Scripture — have you found essential in your understanding of your calling as a Christian psychologist?
Hans
August 17th, 2007 at 4:29 am
Hello Hans,
It is nice to hear from you. Before I anwer your question, allow me to comment on the situation in Germany. As I had written only about 2% of the population are devoted Christians. Additionally we only have a state University system with very few private Universities. And there is not a single Christian University in Germany and even Europe comparable to the ones you have in almost every state. So Christian academia is very very small in Germany compared to what you are used to. And of course only a small fraction out of them are interested in psychology. And quite a good number of them hold the Level’s approach or are integrationists. Besides IGNIS (staff and graduates) we know of only very few people here that are in favor of a Christian Psychology like the Society and IGNIS proposes it. So as you can imagine there has not been much of publishing going on (in general, but esp. in an academic sense). We ourselves have focused on popular publishing, because of the difficulty to sell real academic contributions. And it is the same situation with translation of US books. There is a market for more popular and practical books and thus really well-known authors like Leanne Payne, the Sandfords, Larry Crabb or Henri Nouwen have been translated. But that was basically it. Most of the other books, and esp. academical ones, don’t bring enough numbers in order to be translated.
So in my understanding of Christian Psychology I was mainly shaped by my teachers and colleaugues at IGNIS (e.g. Peter Hübner, Werner May, Wolfram Soldan, Hanne Baar or others). Besides them I was mainly inspired by some of the few people I knew in my training times e.g. Larry Crabb, Henri Nouwen, Hans Bürki or Paul Tournier
Additionally I read quite a few philosophers and theologians (fields where Germans have been stronger) that helped form out my theological background, my quite relational image of man (here I could mention many wonderful authors, like e.g. Martin Buber, Emanuel Levinas, Jörg Splett, Sören Kierkegaard, Emil Brunner, August Brunner, Romano Guardini, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Johann Georg Hamann, Stanley Grenz or others).
Being busy teaching and trying to change the situation a bit myself by writting on Christian Psychology in my correspondance course, it was not before 2000/2001 that I decided to investigate a bit more what was going on in the US. I ran across some of the main journals like the journal of psychology&theology and found helpful things of Dick T. Cole, Stephen M. Clinton or Jeff de Vries. And finally I found the article of Eric Johnson “Christ, the Lord of psycholgy” … I wrote the story in my first blog. It was really amazing, cause I had never read anything before, that had been so close to our teaching. And it puzzled us as well as Eric (and made us believe the more that God was guiding something here) that different people in different parts of the world could come up with something so close. It was Eric that gave me hints regarding US Christian Psychology books I had no idea of before. And of course I read them by now, e.g. of C.Stephan Evens and Robert C.Roberts (Taking the word to heart, Limning the Psyche) or the Four views book Eric co-edited. It was wonderful to read that and find additional similarites.
Well, I hope that gives you a bit of an insight in our situation and answers your question.
Hope to see you at the conference.
Kathrin
September 5th, 2007 at 10:38 am
I want to start by saying that i am so happy to have found a website like this. I have been praying and seeking what God wants from me in my life and lately i have been leaning toward psychology, but i still feel a strong leading to go into the ministry of some kind. I am very very interested in what this site has to say about a “Christian Psychology”. I am a senior in High School this year and i don’t know where to go to college or what to study, but more opportunities are opening up by surfing this webstie and reading more. Could you give me a basic definition of Christian Psychology (if there IS a basic definition), and maybe suggest some books where i could learn more about the subject? Thank you so much, and please keep me in your prayers. I am willing to do anything that God is leading me to
September 6th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Michael,
A good starting point would be to get a hold of the Spring ’97 edition of The Journal of Psychology and Theology and read Eric Johnson’s article, “Christ, the Lord of Psychology”. It is somewhat of a manifesto for Christian Psychology and outlines many of its most important distinctives. Other good resources would be Robert C. Roberts’ book “Taking the Word to Heart: Self and Other in an Age of Therapies”, “Soren Kierkegaard’s Christian Psychology” (by C. Stephen Evans), “Psychology and Christianity: Four Views” (edited by Eric Johnson and Stanton Jones). These would be a good place to start. Larry Crabb has also written several helpful books on the topic of Christian Psychology. A more advanced, but very helpful, book would be Eric Johnson’s “Foundations for Soul Care: A Christian Psychology Proposal”. Other works of a more clinical nature include those by Mark Yarhouse, Stanton Jones, and Richard Butman, to name a few.
Here is my shot at a basic definition of Christian Psychology. It is the discipline of understanding people from a distinctly Christian worldview. As Christians, we have a starting point that in many respects is fundamentally different from the starting point of secular psychologists. Our psychology should therefore look different from theirs. Its research agenda will be different because we do not share all of their concerns. Our therapy will often look different because we have the specific goal in mind of promoting Christlikeness in those people we help. We are still interested in (and thankful for) the truths found in the secular psychologies, but the value we derive from them is always immediately put to work within our own worldview.
At the moment, the best way to study Christian psychology would probably be to attend a Christian university and get a solid grounding in scripture and theology, and perhaps minor in psychology. If a state school is your best option, that’s fine… just read as many biblical and theological resources as possible during your years there. And after this, maybe look into a counseling or clinical psychology graduate degree at a solid Christian school. A solid biblical and theological foundation is essential to practicing psychology from explicitly Christian starting points. There would be plenty of ministry potential with this sort of an education.
I hope this helps! I will pray that you will enjoy God’s richest blessings as you continue to explore your options.
-Nate