2007 September-- Society for Christian Psychology

Wrist Watches on Roman Soldiers

Posted on September 24, 2007

[Editor's note: This is the 4th blog from Mike McGuire for the month of September]

In Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, Roman soldiers are seen wearing wristwatches. In a more recent movie, Gladiator, one can clearly see a modern gas canister underneath an over turned chariot. In the movie, Troy, a very astute viewer has spotted a crew member’s bullhorn poking into the edge of a street scene. These three errors, remind us of the difficulty faced in keeping anachronisms out of the portrayal of ancient cultures.

We Christians can learn a lesson from these errors. God, in His wisdom, chose to reveal His word in ancient languages, through ancient writers to ancient audiences who lived in ancient cultures. Careful exegesis requires that we identify what God revealed in that time, in that place, and in those cultural circumstances, before we attempt to understand the message within our culture and apply it to our audience. In the rush to launch our product, we face the real danger of putting wrist watches on Roman soldiers.

Allow me to share what I see as three common errors we will need to avoid in order to create a Christian psychology. First, I believe we must be very careful with the tendency to study the Bible with our audience’s felt needs in mind. Appealing to felt needs is not always wrong as we can see from how Jesus approached the Samaritan woman (John 4). Yet we are not Jesus and we need to prevent those identified needs from distorting our interpretation of biblical passages. We must begin with a careful interpretation of the biblical passage, before we consider the needs of our contemporary audience. First we study, then we frame our message.

Second, I believe we often err when find step-wise problem-solving processes imbedded in Scripture. Since it first struck me that these processes are a common theme of modernity, I have begun to read the Bible differently. If we stop bringing this idea to the text, we shall largely cease to find it in the text. A couple of years ago, I became interested in a passage in a contemporary book that pointed to four prepositional phrases in a particular Bible verse as biblical support for there being four invariant steps in Christian counseling. I do not have time to explain all I did to test the author’s assertion, but I could find no support in the Greek NT, Greek lexicons, Greek grammars, or the interpretive history of this passage from our day back to the reformation. Yet, this author is not alone in reading such problem solving steps into the Bible. If we eliminated this from sermons and books, I fear a large amount of contemporary American Christianity would go quite.

Third, I have begun to suspect that we read key elements of our personal psychology into what the Bible says about emotions. Matthew Elliot, in a recent book (Faithful Feelings), observes that theologians, when discussing the negative feelings that the Bible warns us avoid, view these as actual feelings, yet many of those same theologians, when discussing positive feelings that we are commanded to exhibit, see these as “attitudes” (a far less emotive term). The author asks, if hatred is a feeling, then why is love an attitude? He thus raises the possibility that in this way we are reading our own psychology into the holy text rather than finding it there.

Clearly, if we are to develop a biblically based Christian psychology, we must think deeply about the proper interpretation of Scripture. We must try to hear what God has said in the Bible in its historical contexts, and not merely what God appears to have said, if His words are run through our contemporary interpretive framework. To do less is the equivalent of putting wrist watches on Roman soldiers.

Filed Under Christian Psychology, William Michael McGuire | 3 Comments

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