Page 11 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 5

Empirical steps toward a Christian Psychology

Tim Sisemore (USA)
Grace Matters: A Christian Psychology Story

It is a great pleasure to share with you the sto- guide for life was God and his revelation in the
ry of a journey: a journey of faith and science. Bible was his wisdom, with wisdom being defi-
Christians by definition value faith and the ned as being like God in one’s character, thin-
things of faith: God, his revelation to us in the king, and behavior. Yet philosophers offered
Bible, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ that he has contrasting approaches to wisdom and their
come into the world, died on the cross and risen counsel was built on simple contemplation,
again to save from sin and to restore us to relati- which might or might not be based on belief in
onship with him. These basics of faith form the God. Still, Christians throughout the New Te-
core of meaning and direction for the Christian. stament era and into the Church age have con-
They are a story of grace: God creating, sustai- sidered matters of one’s behavior, thinking, and
ning, and restoring humans made in his image. emotion to be encompassed by Christian theo-
For the Christian, grace indeed matters. logy. After all, “psychology” literally means the
But this is also a story of science, an effort to study of the soul.
use the methods and language of science to But the contrasting secular approach of the
better understand how grace matters, and how philosophers found new life in the advent of
to communicate this to those who are skepti- modern science and its empirical approaches.
cal unless there is data to support an idea. So, I They would only study what is observable and
hope to also present these matters about grace. measurable, meaning the spiritual realm is bey-
What is it? How do Christians appropriate it? ond the pale of the methods of science. So, sci-
How can we demonstrate that it makes a diffe- ence treads into the intellectual and practical
rence? These are the matters we are to attend to territory traditionally held by people of faith.
in the following paragraphs. Modern scientific psychology overlaps in its
We will first briefly survey the history of in- domain with the areas of Christian theology,
tercourse between Christians and the science doing so while eliminating any assumption that
of psychology before putting the present story God exists and intervenes. So there are two ma-
in the context of a specifically Christian psy- jor ways at looking at persons: through the eyes
chology approach to relating these two fields. of faith and revelation based on a belief in God,
This will allow us to see where in this the story or through science which focuses on observati-
of grace is placed as we turn to the project of on and is methodologically agnostic.
measuring and understanding how Christians Moving beyond mere scientific agnosticism,
grasp and act on grace. In doing so, my goal is early psychologists and psychiatrists were often
to offer a model for a research project that helps hostile to religion. Freud, for example, devo-
us better understand how our faith plays out in ted three major works (1913/1950, 1939/1955,
the lives of Christians, and in doing so commu- 1923/1961) to using his theory to explain reli-
nicate to the scientific community the validity gious faith as basically being a form of psycho-
of Christian constructs. pathology. While certainly many other early
psychologists were friendly to religion in one
Christians and Psychology way or another, modern psychologists as a
Christians wrote about the care of the soul long group are still considerably less religious than
before the advent of modern scientific psycho- the general population. Shafranske (2001) ob-
logy (Sisemore, 2012). (Interested readers can serves that while 90% of the American popu-
find more detailed reviews of this history in lation believes in a personal God, less than one
Eric Johnson’s work [2007, 2010b], but for this third of counseling and clinical psychologists
brief overview I will highlight comments from do.
my [2012] summary.) Even in biblical times the Given this tradition, it is not surprising that
Christians in the United States have had va-

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