Psychology and Biblical Studies



Response to Psychology and Biblical Studies

After reading the papers (some in draft form), I offer some general comments on the relationship between psychology and biblical studies, and then three more specific observations.

First, James Beck notes that psychology and biblical studies have a common subject. They study humanity. He also notes that teaching that comes from outside the faith will need setting in the context of Christian faith. Dr Beck starts from Daniel and notes that the four young men were already trained in Israelite wisdom. I would like to complement that by noting a significant feature of that wisdom, represented for us in Proverbs. Proverbs offers teaching on how to see life and how to live life, on the big questions about the nature of the world and what it means to be human and on concrete questions about wealth, sex, and (among other things) how the human person works—on the relationship between the outer person and the inner person, and so on. Much of its teaching is common to other Middle Eastern writings, but Proverbs has already done that setting in context, and in its opening paragraph it begins by laying out a framework for undertaking that. It talks of wisdom, discernment, knowledge, and insight, but sets that talk in association with two other sorts of talk with which we do not always associate them. On one had, they belong with “faithfulness, judgment, and uprightness.” And on the other, they belong in a framework that recognizes that “reverence for Yahweh is the first principle of wisdom.” In succeeding chapters, Proverbs will make clear that it is indeed quite happy to learn from the wisdom of other peoples, but its opening has already noted that in looking at what can be learned from outside the community of faith, it always says “Yes, but.” Such learning always has to be set in the context of ethics, and specifically Israelite ethics, and it always has to be set in the context of a commitment to God, and specifically to the God of Israel.

So it is possible to bring learning from outside the faith into relationship with the faith itself. Is it necessary, then, for psychology and theology to be separate disciplines?

One sort of response is to say they look at humanity from different angles. One starts from empirical study, the other from scripture and the church’s tradition. Yet that only restates the question. Why are the insights from these resources the subject of separate disciplines? One answer to that question is historical and cultural. In an ideal world there might simply be Christian psychology, informed by a Christian theological understanding of humanity before God and by empirical study. And there might be psychological theology, theology systematically informed by psychological insight. What we have instead is psychology with Christian glosses and theology or biblical studies with psychological glosses. But perhaps that is as well, because when science and faith have been interwoven, this has imperiled truth as well as enriched it. In the sciences and the humanities, some separation of the estates is a wise idea, to guard against a totalitarianism of science or a totalitarianism of biblical studies.

Richard Averbeck notes that the word “theology” suggests that it starts from God, while the word “psychology” suggests it starts from humanity. Theology and psychology come at the same reality from opposite ends. The difference in the words also points us to other facts. Robert Roberts suggests that if etymology is any guide (though of course it never is), psychologists are people who study the soul. Actually, talk of the soul makes most psychologists shuffle their feet. Psychology developed in a secular and/or agnostic and/or atheist framework. It sought to be a science and to be value-free. This was a pretense, of course; psychology had its values. But formally it renounced any framework for thinking about values that applied to everyone, and also for thinking about people’s relationship with God as part of their humanity. Indeed, it often saw religious beliefs and experiences as inherently neurotic. Of course religious beliefs often are neurotic, so that may be a helpful stance.

Psychology thus has its biases. But biblical study and theological study also have their biases. That includes people who commit themselves to accepting all of scripture in the conviction that it is complete, sufficient, and pure (to use James Beck’s words). Their having their biases is then the more dangerous because the questioning is not overt. Those of us who take the view that the whole of scripture makes demands upon us are put into difficulty when it says something we do not like. We cannot overtly disagree with it, so we have to do so covertly, or to marginalize it, or to reinterpret it. So it would not do to put psychology under the umbrella of biblical theology, because biblical theology is a human discipline that contains many unbalances, omissions, and mistakes. Psychology needs to have its independent voice in order that it can raise questions about biblical studies—not about the Bible, but about people who study the Bible. Psychology might even uncover the neurotic reasons why theologians say the things they do.

Secondly, and by way of footnote to that, an observation on an aspect of the significance of Everett Worthington’s paper. Tom Wright is someone who seeks to do biblical theology, and I like his framework because it does better justice to the place of the Old Testament in scripture than New Testament scholars usually do. But it looks as if Dr Worthington would be unhappy for psychology to sit under the umbrella of this biblical theology.

I am not competent to comment on the “New Perspective on Paul,” but what Dr Worthington’s paper interestingly illustrates is that psychological arguments work in association with views that are also held on other grounds. Dr Worthington has exegetical grounds for believing that Tom Wright is mistaken, as well as psychological grounds. He would reckon Wright was mistaken even if he were not a psychologist. So his psychological arguments are functioning within a broader context, as social-scientific and philosophical and historical arguments do. To put it another way, psychological study is not functioning as a means of illuminating scripture but as the means of resolving an exegetical dispute. And it is so functioning not on the part of someone who has no interest in the question but of someone who believes they know the right answer and is using psychological arguments to prove the point they wish to make.

Thirdly, I note that there are more open-ended ways in which we might seek to let psychology inform biblical study. Each Tuesday my wife and I have dinner with a group of friends. Two are psychologists in the final year of their PhD, one is an MDiv graduate who is a youth pastor, and a fourth is a missiologist-ethnomusicologist. Some of the questions we have found ourselves discussing in recent weeks are: what is the nature or the extent of the transformation that a psychologist hopes to facilitate in a client? Wherein lie the resources for such transformation and what is the nature of the obstacles to it? Where does change come from? Some of my own recent thinking on the question was stimulated by a chapel sermon in which the preacher referred to the cesspool of sin within us that continues to affect our attitudes. The idea of there being a cesspool within us seemed oddly compatible with psychological insights into the disorderly contents of the id or into the raging of our angers or desires or hatreds or envies. Yet my first thought (in the context of chapel itself) was that the idea of there being a cesspool within us seemed oddly incompatible with strands of scriptural teaching that see us as given a renewed nature in Christ, so that the person who is born again does not sin. Particular lapses might be possible under that rubric, but a cesspool seemed another matter. Yet the Corinthian Christians did behave as if there was a cesspool there. Theories about the Christian life, and sin and righteousness, about obedience and sanctification, are often expounded on the basis of a narrow raft of texts from Romans and John without much reference to other parts of scripture or to insights from outside scripture on human nature.

I think it could be interesting and fruitful for biblical scholars and psychologists to talk together in an open way about questions such as how we understand the human person, what is the nature of sin, what is the nature of the renewal that comes to us in Christ, what is the nature of the process of growth that takes people towards Christian maturity, what is the process whereby people change their minds and attitudes and commitments. Psychologists might then contribute to the exegetical task of clarifying what the scriptures mean, even as biblical scholars might help psychologists get clearer on the way they look at their own aims, expectations, and methods.

Fourthly, a comment on story. Richard Averbeck notes that we need to set our story in the context of scripture’s story. This seems to me a most important insight, even though it is a fashionable postmodern one.

At the School of Psychology at Fuller Seminary, certain theology courses are required by the program. The required Old Testament course is the Writings, which in the English Bible equates with the books from Chronicles to Song of Songs, plus Ruth, Lamentations, and Daniel. In beginning the course as I do with Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Ruth, and Esther, I draw students’ attention to the fact that the course thus seeks to encourage them to set their stories in the context of the biblical macro-story and in the context of the stories of individuals in scripture. Ruth and Esther do that for them on the small scale—as do the stories in Daniel. Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah does that for them on the broadest scale, extending as it does from Adam to Nehemiah (in Daniel we complete the arc from the Beginning with a big B to the End with big E). Oddly, of course, Chronicles says only one word about the Beginning (the word “Adam”), so that the macro-story in which I invite them to set their lives does not focus on the story of the Beginning, as Dr Averbeck does, in keeping with Christian tradition.

That change of focus is not deliberate, an advantage in it is that it gives the opportunity to encourage students to set their stories in the context of the story of the people of God as a corporate body. Psychology is a discipline that focuses primarily on individuals. It is of course concerned with seeing individuals relationally, but this does not affect the point. It is still the individual as the form of being human that is its focus. But being human also takes corporate form. Cities, seminaries, congregations, nations, and cultures are forms of being human, forms of experience, meaning, awareness, responsibility, action, strength, and weakness. Who we are and what we do is as decisively determined by the culture to which we belong as it is by our individual story, experience, and character. Psychology takes account of that in the way it studies and ministers to the individual, but it is not its task to study or minister to corporate bodies. It is then a deep problem that in our culture, psychology by its nature inevitably colludes with our individualism, which resists taking the corporate seriously but cannot escape it because it is part of the way God created humanity. Scripture holds the corporate and the individual, the people of God and the believer, in balance. Setting our story in light of scripture’s story has potential for rescuing us from our individualism.

 

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