Psychological Theology

Although he earned a PhD in Psychology, Dr. Terrell was nevertheless an outspoken critic of psychology and the psychology that had seeped into the Church. Sigmund Freud's ideas were not, in his opinion, appropriately spurned by the Church. Echoing similar ideas, Joe Carter of The Gospel Coalition blogged recently about the connection between Freudianism and the "new deism" infiltrating the church:

Freud's enduring legacy on folk psychology is twofold. Most significant is his turn to the hidden recesses of a person's inner being, rather than the outer influences of community and environment, in order to uncover the true self and determine what is necessary for emotional health and happiness. Second is the language either invented by or colored by Freudian psychoanalysis: denial, projection, repression, sublimation, id, ego, fetish, fixation, introversion, anal-retentive, neurotic, Oedipus complex, pleasure-principle. These are the terms that Americans---a perpetually self-diagnosing people---use to communicate with and understand our neighbors, and ourselves. 

This therapeutic lingo forms the conceptual basis by which other technical jargons---such as theological terms---are interpreted. Consider the term "closure," the idea that after trauma or loss, individuals have an innate need for a firm solution rather than enduring ambiguity. Closure is a concept derived from Gestalt therapy with no parallel in Scripture, yet it is often considered a necessary precondition for forgiveness, particularly forgiveness concerning a grave injustice. The idea that God would expect us to forgive without first experiencing closure strikes the Therapeutic Deist as akin to emotional nihilism. 

These therapeutic concepts also have a way of coloring our understanding of God's self-revelation. In Isaiah 48:11, God claims to seek his own glory: "For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another." Such passages confuse the modern Deist, for they make God appear to be---to use another term coined by Freud---a "narcissist." 

More often, though, therapeutic language wholly replaces theological concepts. In his study, [sociologist Christian] Smith notes that the teenagers used the phrase "feel happy" more than 2,000 times in the interviews. None of them used the terms "justification" or "being justified," "sanctification" or "being sanctified." The "grace of God" was explicitly mentioned only three times. 

"The language, and therefore experience," Smith found, "of Trinity, holiness, sin, grace, justification, sanctification, church, Eucharist, and heaven and hell appear, among most Christian teenagers in the United States at the very least, to be supplanted by the language of happiness, niceness, and an earned heavenly reward." Smith views this not as a sign that Christianity is being secularized, but that it is either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or being replaced by a quite different religious faith.

Read the full post at The Gospel Coalition here.