On Psychology and Faith, A Theological Exploration of Psychotherapy (III)

A sobering question that rises for me as I reflect on the findings of psychology in relation to my Christian faith, is the tenuous nature of the “self”; the filament-thin connections, I mean, between all the different aspects of our selves that together make us who we are. This often hits me most sharply when I’m learning about neuroscience in the context of my study of psychology. Although there are still vast regions of the brain that remain uncharted, still, humans have discovered amazing amounts of information about what makes our grey matter work. When I come across detailed discussions of the brain’s inner-workings, however, I often struggle with feelings of existential dread. If the brain really is a network of cells and synapses, charged with electricity and surging with chemical reactions, and if this really is what our thoughts “consist of,” then what is there about those thoughts that makes them more than merely those pulses and charges and chemical reactions.

These questions intensify for me when I discover how quickly certain medications can alter a person’s personality or transform their mental state. If ingesting a tiny amount of some specific chemical compound or other can actually change how we experience our selves on a fundamental level, you can’t help but wonder what a person really “is,” that it can be so easily manipulated by such material means.

A book by Christian Sociologist Christian Smith called What Is a Person? recently helped me wrestle through these questions. Smith defines a person as a “conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending centre of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who . . . exercises complex capacities for agency . . . in order to develop and sustain his or her own incommunicable self in loving relationships with [other selves] and the non-personal world.” It’s certainly a mouthful of a definition, but each morsel in there has been carefully chosen to express something about the fundamental nature of human personhood. When you take the time to unpack it, you start to see that what makes me or you you or me is a subtle, intricate interaction of realities that together are greater than the some of their parts.

This is actually a central idea in Smith’s definition of personhood, something he calls the concept of “emergence.” According to Smith, emergence refers to “the process of constituting a new entity with its own particular characteristics through the interactive combination of other, different entities that are necessary to create the new entity, but do not contain the characteristics present in the new entity.” Emergence occurs when two or more entities at a “lower level” interact, serving in this way as the basis for a new, “higher level” entity with characteristics that cannot be reduced to those of the lower entities. With this definition in mind, we can say that a person is an “emergent reality,” coming into being through the “lower level” interaction of our bodily components, our mental and emotional capacities, our relationships with others, and so on, in a such a way that the whole of who we are is greater than the sum of these individual parts.

The value of this concept in understanding the self—especially from a Christian theological perspective—is the way it guards against reductionism, the modern tendency to view human persons as “nothing but” the material elements of which they are composed. Smith refers to the reductionist move as “Nothing Buttery,” and argues that such a view keeps us from understanding the full breadth and depth of what it means do be human. In contrast to this, an emergent view of human life insists that there are higher, irreducible levels of meaning and purpose that are not immediately present in the lower levels of human existence. This non-reductionistic view intersects meaningfully with a theological anthropology, which has always insisted that there is more to us than our biological matter.

Of course, the Christian tradition has long maintained that there are spiritual realities emergent from the material components of human life. I often feel, however, that this is not well understood in popular Christian teaching. A common Christian assumption is that the spiritual is separate from and more important than the physical, and certainly not in any way related to the material. Smith’s discussion of emergence is a helpful reminder that, whatever the “spiritual” aspect of human life may be, it is emerges from the material, depending on it in some way while being at the same time “greater than the sum of its material parts.” This encourages a more holistic, and ultimately more biblical approach to things like worship, prayer, and other Christian practices, one that engages the body along with the mind and the spirit.

While Christians are not usually guilty of reductionism when it comes to spiritual things, and rightly argue against seeing human beings as “nothing but” their material bodies, a perspective like Smith’s helpfully guards us against an error Christians often make in practicing reductionism in the other direction. By this I mean the tendency of Christians, and especially of evangelicals, to reduce human persons to “nothing but” their immaterial spirits, “contained” in physical bodies which have no importance beyond their role as “vessels” for the spirit. This shows up in the work of ministries that emphasize “saving souls” while downplaying “social justice” and denigrating “the social gospel.” It shows up more subtlety in the common evangelical suspicion of creation care and environmentalism as legitimate Christian concerns. Christians can be just as “Nothing Buttery” when it comes to spiritual things as secular people can be when it comes to physical, and a deep engagement with sociological ideas like the ones presented in What is a Person? would help us guard against this kind of unbiblical dualism.

On Psychology and Faith, A Theological Exploration of Psychotherapy (II)

I did not fully appreciate the schism that exists in some circles between psychology and the Christian theology, until I took some introductory-level counseling courses for my Masters of Divinity, when I was preparing for ministry back in 2004. That was some 20 years ago now, of course, and the schism seems less wide now than it did back then. Between the various efforts in secular culture to shine a spotlight on the very real challenges of mental illness, on the one hand, and the good work of Christian psychologists like Larry Crabb, Mark McMinn, and Grant Mullens, on the other, there seems to be much more cross pollination between these two disciplines than there was two decades ago. Back then, one of the hotly debate topics in my pastoral counseling courses was whether or not there could be any reconciliation between faith and psychology at all; and though none of them were endorsed by our instructors, I did read a good number of books by evangelical pastors, back then, that issued a flat-out, resounding “no!” to the question.

Today, as I say, there is less a schism than an uneasy cohabitation. Certainly most clergy that I know and work alongside will agree unbegrudgingly that psychology has its place. Many churches I know offer bona-fide Christian counseling services, and those that don’t frequently refer parishioners to such services. The Christian embrace of psychology is not universal, by any means. I still have colleagues among the clergy who cock questioning eyebrows when discussing the reality of mental health in the church. Richard Beck, one of my favorite psychologist-theologians, recently did an extended series on his blog about the challenges many Christians face in understanding and responding well to mental health issues (I’d encourage you to check out that series here). So there are still many corners of Christendom where psychology, and the issues it addresses, are viewed with great suspicion.

As someone who has studied psychology at length, and worked for many years in pastoral ministry, who has, as it were seen both sides of the fence, I find this suspicion difficult to understand. As someone who has personally benefitted from the work of a trained therapist, I find it regrettable. My personal conviction is that the theories, findings, hypotheses, and models-of-the-self provided by psychology can actually expand and enrich our theology as Christians, and the help that psychology can provide to those suffering mentally is a gift that should be welcome in the church.

I have wondered if one of the reasons Christians might feel uneasy about making space for psychology in the ministry of the church has to do with an incomplete, and largely unbiblical understanding of what human beings are. In Christian circles, we tend to think of human nature as a body/soul duality in some sense. Sometimes this is divided even further, to a body/spirit/soul dichotomy, or a mind/body/spirit division, but the key point is that “we” (whoever we are) are not our “bodies.” The true “me” is the immaterial, interior, soul within, but not the flesh and bone vessel that contains it.

Biblically, however, human beings are not so much “souls” contained in “bodies” as they are body/soul unities. Space precludes an extended exploration of this claim, but most contemporary theological readings of the scripture point in this direction: that the human being is not a body/soul duality, but a unity.

We do not “have bodies”; we are bodies.

Neither do we “have souls”; we are souls. And body and soul together make the human creature what it is. In lieu of an extended biblical exegesis, let me simply point you to the bodily resurrection of Jesus to make this point. Our bodies are not immaterial parts of ourselves, easily cast off when no longer needed. They are so integral to who we are that we are promised, in the Christian hope, resurrection bodies like the resurrection bodies of our Lord.

If it’s true, this claim has all kinds of implications when it comes to making sense of psychology as a Christian, but two stand out in particular to me. On the one hand, it would mean that, in principle, Christians should not hesitate to seek the help of psychologists for mental unwellness, any more than they’d hesitate to see a doctor for a broken bone. If the body and the soul really do make an integrated whole, then it stands to reason that both can legitimately be addressed by modern medicine, and neither is “off limits” as a domain of scientific understanding.

On the other hand, the body/soul unity we discover in scripture reminds us that both can and should be an object of Christian care, concern, and compassion. If the body is integral to being human, then caring for its physical wellness matters. And if the soul—the “inner self”—is inextricably bound to the body, then caring for our mental wellness matters just as much.

There is more to say, certainly, about the role of psychology in a Christian understanding of the self. More to say, for instance, about acknowledging the limits of psychology. And more to say about the way that Christian faith imposes its own unique ethic on the use and practice of psychology. But if nothing else, the fact that humans are as much their minds as they are their bodies should assure us that there is a place in a Christian understanding of the world, for the things that psychology can teach us about ourselves.