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.