Page 8 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 6

Eric L. Johnson (USA) person and work of Jesus Christ and the uni-

Is a Christian Psychology on of believers to him. The Apostle Paul, for
example, made many brief comments on psy-
a Legitimate and Viable chological topics related to Christian salvation
(Roberts, 1995). In comparison with contem-
Scientific Project? porary psychology, biblical teaching relevant to
psychology and counseling was much less em-
pirically rigorous, written in everyday language
As is well-known, the word stem of psychology for average readers, rather than in a scientific
comes from the Greek word “psyché,” translated genre. Nevertheless, the Bible provides Christi-
“soul” in English, and along with most sciences, ans with divinely-inspired “spectacles” through
it adds a suffix derived from the Greek word which they can interpret God and the world, in-
“logos,” meaning “word” or “knowledge”, so cluding human beings. Starting from Scripture,
etymologically psychology refers to the “study many Christians in subsequent centuries con-
of the soul.” Nevertheless, contemporary psy- tributed to a Christian version of psychology,
chology is now widely considered to be a secu- and especially the care of souls, with a pastoral,
lar, positivistic discipline that since its founding monastic, or philosophical agenda, influenced
in the late 1800’s has rejected the existence of some by previous ancient psychologists like
metaphysical objects like souls. That is becau- Plato, Aristotle, and Hippocrates. Christians
se a scientific revolution happened in the study like Augustine, Ireneaus, Gregory of Nyssa, and
of human beings in the late 1800’s, because of Augustine in the Early Church; Maximus the
the appropriation of natural science sensibilities Confessor, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas
and methods, which has led to an enormous Aquinas in the Middle Ages; and Luther, Pas-
growth in psychological knowledge since that cal, Edwards, and Kierkegaard in the Modern
time. As a result, most psychologists today assu- era, among many others, composed a substan-
me that the contemporary form of psychology tial body of Christian psychological and soul-
is the only legitimate kind of psychology there healing literature by the mid-1800’s. However,
is or can be. Historians of psychology, however, within 100 years this “old psychology,” based
know that very different versions can be found largely on theology and philosophy, had been
throughout Western cultural history, going decisively replaced by the “new psychology,”
back to ancient times (Foucault, 2005; Nuss- which was based instead on careful empirical
baum, 1994; Robinson, 1981; Watson & Evans, observation and methods like the experiment,
1991), to say nothing of the well-developed and quantitative analysis.
psychologies of India and China, and the rela- Severely complicating this conversion story of
tively undocumented indigenous psychologies Western psychology was the “secular revoluti-
of countless peoples throughout human history. on” (Smith, 2003) that occurred concurrently
Philosophers in ancient Greece, like Plato (429- and was tragically confounded with its remar-
347, B.C.), Aristotle (382-322, B.C.), and the kable scientific advances, constituted by the si-
Stoics, wrote brilliant analyses of the soul, and multaneous replacement of a Judeo-Christian
Hippocrates (c. 460-379, B.C.), a Greek physi- worldview by the worldview of naturalism as
cian, attempted to describe the biological basis the dominant set of basic assumptions about
of mental illness. These early Western intellectu- reality.
als attempted to describe psychological aspects Naturalism is the worldview that assumes that
of human nature on the basis of personal expe- only natural entities exist and that beliefs are ju-
rience, reflection in light of prior thought, and stified only by the methods of empirical science
some careful empirical investigation. (Goetz & Taliaferro, 2008; Post, 1995). As a re-
More importantly for Christians, the Scriptures sult, naturalism is especially oriented to the em-
are saturated with psychological insights and pirical, the objective, the measurable, and the
spiritual wisdom and provide a divine frame- material. All worldview adherents by definiti-
work for the healing of the soul, based on the on consider their basic assumptions to be true,

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