[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 final post] 

Travel, they say, broadens the mind, and a mind-expanding, recent trip to the US allowed me to share ideas with leading figures in Christianity’s engagement with psychology, through meeting representatives of both Christian psychological and integrationist perspectives.  It seems opportune, therefore, to use this, the last of my current blogs, partly as a public thank-you to my hosts, and to reflect on the continuum of approaches to secular psychology by Christian psychologists and therapists working in the US part of the vineyard and beyond.

The welcomes I received in the US were warm, accepting, and exemplary.  All were models of Christian hospitality, and provided opportunities for future collaborative bridge building.  I cannot thank my hosts enough for this.  They will know who they are.  What they may not know is that since returning home I have been thinking about hospitality as an important mode for our engagement both with the world of secular psychology and, of course, with each other.  Why is this?

It’s because I’ve feared at times that unless we consciously and consistently act hospitably in our debates, we may ride roughshod over the valid and important achievements of our secular colleagues in our own justifiable enthusiasm to progress psychology’s Christianisation.  Moreover, exclusive, or rather excluding allegiance to one or other of what is collectively, after all, a partially overlapping set of activities, albeit distinctive ones, namely integrationism, psychology-theology dialogue, Christian psychology and Biblical Counseling, could too easily fuel unhelpful inter-nicene disputes, and distract us from what we otherwise usefully hold in common.  The tragedy then would be were we to be hampered and diverted precisely when we might make a significant and critical collective impact on psychological theory and practice, as well as being hindered in our building of distinctively Christian psychologies and related approaches.

Luke Bretherton’s excellent monograph Hospitality as holiness: Christian witness amid moral diversity has greatly enriched and deepened my theological and psychological understanding here. While appreciating important work done by MacIntyre, Hauerwas and others on the rationality and commensurability of rival traditions, Bretherton is concerned that overenthusiastic use of the notion of rivalry could too easily provoke all too familiar ‘in-group’ dynamics.  This is turn could precipitate a combative, and, so, implicitly un-Christian reaction.  This might seriously affect for the worse the way we deal with our secular colleagues, and, by extension I now suggest, each other.

But Christianity is not an ontology of violence, and our behaviour should reflect this. Good hospitality creates the room and peaceful conditions for feasting, sharing and debating even with those with whom we sometimes vehemently disagree.  Nor need hospitable dialogue involve abandonment of the truth, capitulation, or the otherwise inappropriate ceding of concessions to secularity.  Bretherton suggests we could even consider replacing tolerance as the highest value of pluralism with hospitality for instance, since separation-with-grudging-tolerance frequently leads to indifference and stand off, whereas dialogue-with-welcoming-hospitality affords space for trusting interaction and robust challenge. 

He explains further why this is so, thereby self evidently showing why this approach is so useful for us as Christians in psychology:

It is through the cosmogenic recapitulation of Jesus Christ that we are born again out of our existent chaos and disorder: however, this very chaos, that is our degenerate patterns of sociality, is the very stuff of our new life. It is thus a departure-in-the-midst-of and not a departure-from-the-midst-of a culture.  In other words, being good, pure, holy and moral cannot be secured either by withdrawal from our culture, or assimilation to it.   To withdraw from its cultural context is to deny what the church is reconstituted from, while to be assimilated by its cultural context is to deny what the church is becoming. Hence, we must neither deny our cultural inheritance nor over-freight it with significance [....] In sum, the thought and action of the church and its members [....] is neither  totally alien to any culture (it is not inevitably incommensurable with other traditions) nor is it simply another version of what they know  (it is not self evident), (Bretherton, 2006, p.112).

The different lessons this approach offers to Christian strategies of engagement with psychology, and for their communities interacting with each other, should be self evident: excessive tendencies toward separation and integration may both need to be wisely tempered and carefully balanced, even while each enthusiastically pursues their legitimately different goals, and perhaps all this is best done in a hospitable family context.

I began these blogs asking rhetorically whether I am a Christian psychologist.  I hope it’s clear by now that I am, and that I’m happy to take my appropriate place in the family of Christian approaches to critiquing and enriching secular psychology.

Reference

Bretherton, L. Hospitality as holiness:  Christian witness amid moral diversity.

London: Ashgate, 2006.