Page 69 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 5

Church Traditions for a Christian Psychology

ly and, hopefully, with godly wisdom. As this Embodied Souls
understanding of being personal takes root in The theology we inhabit includes a doctrine
my writing I have moved from the more formal of God and a doctrine of the person. It inclu-
style of the academy to something that drifts des more than this, but it cannot include less.
toward the personal and includes generous in- Though my doctrine of the person has a number
sertions of “I” and “we.” By nature I am not one of parts, a feature that shapes my daily counse-
who prefers to draw attention to myself, so my ling practice can be summarized by embodied
writing style is more an expression of my theo- souls.
logy than my personality.
We consist of two substances. There are three
We are friends. The Crucified One has, through positions in response to the ontological questi-
his death, called us friends. Though Moses and on, Of what do we consist? (Figure 1) (1) We
Abraham had that kind of relationship with the consist of body alone and what we call soul
Holy God, I certainly would not presume such emerges out of the brain and can affect the
a thing, until Jesus broke Creator-creature pro- brain. (2) We consist of a unity of body and
tocol and in his death razed all barriers between soul, in which soul overlaps with words such
us (John 15:14). He has spoken openly to us, as spirit, heart, mind and inner person. Or (3)
he invites us to speak that way to him, he has we consist of three parts - body, soul and spirit.
set a course that heads toward unity with God Of these three, the monist position is the only
and with other people - he has made the world position in secular thought and it is prominent
right. In this corrected universe we discover in some Christian colleges and universities. The
that knowledge is grounded in personal know- duality position is favored in the history of the
ledge of God, and that personal knowledge is protestant church. The tripartite position re-
expressed in love. mains most popular in Christian and integra-
This suggests that principles for living, no mat- tionist psychology, and it persists among many
ter how useful, are superficial unless they are dispensationalists through the influence of the
tethered to the one we live for. Therapeutic Scofield Reference Bible.
techniques such as mindfulness and identifying
distorted beliefs might be helpful, but they miss
our relational foundation. For example, mind-
fulness uses mental effort to stay in the present,
but we can be focused on the present because
we belong to the One who is with us, concerns
himself with our future, and assures us that the
end is good. Cognitive therapies identify per-
fectionism, but we can look deeper and see our
instinctive works-righteousness, which is a way Figure 1. These three circles represent three ways of un-
to forge our independence from God rather derstanding people: monist, duality or embodied soul,
than to rest in him. and tripartite.
For the Apostle Paul, Jesus Christ is the inter-
pretive center of life. This does not mean that
we will speak explicitly about Jesus in all our I have become more and more persuaded that
conversations or counseling. It does mean for commitments at this level have enormous im-
me, however, that my goal is to adopt Paul’s plications for the way we do our therapeutic
theology and method so that Christ and him
crucified shapes the way I love my wife, care for work. Since these matters are discussed in most
theological texts, and I have little to add to the
my neighbors, wash my car and carry out my underlying exegesis and debates, I will only of-
work as a counselor and educator, though I will fer a prosaic but useful analogy for my position
need a few more decades before I get the knack and then demonstrate this theology at work.
of it.

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