[by Peter Hampson, Head of Department of Psychology, University of the West of England, Bristol. Professor Hampson is our blogger for the month of November, and this is his third post]

In what ways might philosophy and philosophical theology inform and assist Christian Psychology?  Last time, I briefly mentioned my debt to Alasdair MacIntyre’s intellectual journey. MacIntyre’s work has helped me understand that rational discourse between intellectual traditions is possible in a way that allows escape from the limitations of both a ‘one-size-fits-all’ modernist rationality, and an equally unsatisfactory to my mind, postmodern, narrative relativism.

A second major influence on my thinking has been discussions of the faith-reason relationship.  To some extent, such discussions have been at the heart of Christianity’s self understanding for last the last two thousand years, but certainly since the church fathers, and are part of our more general thinking about the relationship between Christianity and culture.  More recently, however, the debate has been developed by the late Pope John Paul II in his thoughtful and influential encyclical, Fides et Ratio (FR), where the dual dynamic of faith-seeking-understanding and understanding seeking completion and perfection through faith is sensitively explored. FR charts a careful course between a restricted view of reason as closed from belief or ‘ratiocinative’ on the one hand, and faith understood as divorced from reason (or fideism) on the other.  Interested readers might like to follow the link to read more:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html

A further related powerful influence has been the Radical Orthodoxy project associated with Cambridge and Nottingham based theologians, John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, Simon Oliver and others.  RO is a complex theological movement, emerging from a High Anglican context.  In tune with postmodernity, at its heart lies the recovery of theological concepts that have been obscured and distorted over the years especially since the Enlightenment.  To this extent it bears some resemblance with the nouvelle theologie movement which helped inform the second Vatican Council. One such concept is the patristic (neo-Platonic) understanding of ‘participation’.  In contrast to the idea that God is yet another entity, albeit a super one, or a ‘being amongst other beings’, and asserting the radical dependence of creation on God, participation invites us to think of our life ‘in God’ as the one in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28) and completely and utterly depend. Developing this idea is beyond the scope of a brief blog, but suffice it to say that it sits well with a rejection of a ‘pure autonomous nature’ open to explanation through reductive ‘naturalism’, and implies that ultimately all our (fallen) human understanding can only be part of the divine understanding but that now, of course, we ‘see through a glass darkly’ (1 Corinthians 13:12).

If, ex hypothesi, reason, is not closed (as the secular, positivist scientism of a Richard Dawkins might suggest), and nature, while radically different from God is not radically distant from and in that sense separate from the Trinitarian God, as to be completely autonomous and solely explicable in secular terms, what is the relevance of this sort of understanding for the CP project?  In a nutshell, I suggest that it allows space for a secular understanding of the world, with which dialogue is possible, while at the same time clearly showing the limits of such secular understanding.  More particularly it implies that psychology as a scientific discipline will always be ‘incomplete’ if it lacks a broader philosophical and theological perspective.  Even psychology’s best accounts will be necessary but not sufficient, while its weakest will frequently be found to be conceptually distorted and impoverished.

As for faith, well, however else we construe it, the Christian tradition has been clear that faith is at least theological virtue, or what Thomas calls a ‘habitus‘, and I will explore the latter concept next time.