God, The Bible, Jesus Christ, Life which came first? and which controls which?
Have you ever thought about our practices today...Science, Agriculture, Nutrition, Medicine, and Psychology and compared them to those of bilical times? Are we smarter today than Adam and Eve where or are we "dumbed down" and getting dumber? If I am not successful, productive and serving am I sinning, damaged or am I, just what I was designed to be, simply a vessel to carry things or to store the gifts of the Creator?
Many consider Science, Agriculture, and Nutrition but many do not consider medical/health issues and Psychology (Psychological, Cognitive, Emotions, and Personality issues) as biblically revelant. Some think these are punishments or some how not supposed to be part of God. But, if you really look at the Bible, you find something completely different. The Mind, Body and Spirit are mentioned in scripture several times, so they must be a part of God's plan too. I think Ecclesiastes, Daniel and Job all reveal "Biblical Psychology principals" David was clearly an emotional, troubled, and confused man. Solomon was the wisest man in the Bible, yet he was overpowder by his freewill and poor judgment and suffered greatly, yet loved God. Paul definitely shows us some medical and psychological issues.
Life is a complex mystery sometimes, a raging ocean with wild crashing waves that are stories high others, and then others it is so simple and calm and beautiful like a calm lake at sunset. What determines the experience we get? We do ..... We can choose to do it our way, follow the world and suffer the internal conflicts or we can choose to call out to God when we hear him pass by us and yield to Him and his guiding light.
Think about working with clay. It is moist, specialized dirt that can be shaped, built into vessels and hardened, sealed and used to carry things. So can we! Remember where Adam came from? God gathered some dirt and breathed into, and Adam came alive. Then God, put him to sleep and took one of his ribs to put into Eve, she too is made from the earth, and has God's breath in her.
The vessel was shaped and air removed the water and sealed the shape. And the vessel was put to use and given a name and purpose. They were given a wonderful setting to enhance them and for them to enhance the setting. Everything is good, and then...the wind begins to rage and the waters get rocky.
Adam and Eve walking in the garden with fruit and animals of every kind and in the evening God came and Walked, and Talked with them and taught them things and there was just one (1) condition, they could go anywhere and eat anything except for the fruit on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that was off limits. Adam was to tell Eve all the things that God shared with him. We don't know if she forgot, or if she thought he was trying to stand in her way of having something great, but Eve listened to someone who told her "She could do it, She deserved it, Why would God punish her, if He loved her? She started changing God's wording, from a simple decision to obey to something more "tangible and provable", "she stated that God told her they could not touch the fruit, but that is not what God said, and the "serpent" tormented her and kept telling her, she deserved to have that fruit, and she finally caved and touch it, and then thought she had broken Gods rule, but she had deceived herself, so she figured she had already done wrong might as well go for it and see what she was missing. And then, she took it to Adam and she deceived him with her self-deceiving thinking and convinced him to eat it too. But... He was responsible to test what he was hearing, He also bit into the desire for something other than God, but He too deceived himself into thinking he was forced to do wrong by someone else, (VICTIM) and He was angry with God and blamed God for giving him this flawed women that did this bad thing. Again, there is always two choices, the right and wrong way. There is the decision to be with God or away from Him.
Because they choose to eat from the tree, they know knew what God knew and could now acknowledge evil, shame, guilt and doubt. But they could decide to turn to God and lean on him, but that would require them denying themselves and acknowledging God being higher than them and that His way is better than theirs.
God had to cloth them, (His provision was better than what they were able to make for themselves). His mercy is seen when he clothes them, and continues to love them but they must leave the Garden and will have to work the ground and provide for themselves. But, God still communicates with them. And they still love Him, and praise Him, they teach their children and raise them following God's orders and their children teach their children about God and his practices and record them.
God planned, created, breathed into, forgave, provided for, and Loved. He gave the gift of freewill of choice to Adam and Eve, hoping they would choose to Love Him and receive the gifts and enjoyment of the land and animals that he created for them, because it pleased Him. God designed us to crave connecting and acknowledgement of Him and the reception of His plans for our dominion and enjoyment that will yield Him pleasure to see us prospering and increasing the family all desiring to praise God for the creation, breath, forgiveness, mercy, and Love that have been passed down to us. As time has gone on we can see through the pages of the bible, many many stories (examples) of how people made the wrong choices, and how they delayed their gifts and enjoyment because they chose other things or themselves instead of God. The praise songs are not just words they are the voice of the holy spirit, that is in us at the point of salvation, inspired by Gods teachings.
Give me one pure and holy passion. Light my path, that I may not stumble. Our mind, Body and Spirt are centered around our gift of the breathe that Christ breathed into us, and much like being in the midst of a crisis or temper tantrum, all we have to do is, Stop! and Breath, and allow God to take over. Just like Adam and Eve did in the Garden. We will loose things we cherish, we will suffer wrongs and betrayals by others, we will make bad, destructive choices, we will shed many tears, we will finally loose our life on this earth...But as long as Christ is our backbone we will rise and go to heaven with the father, just like Christ did.
All this is in the scriptures, this is to be our pure and holy passion, to pleasure God, to Glorify Him in all we think, say and do. To love God with our whole Mind, whole body and whole spirit. Anything that splits any part of us or our relationships needs to be turned over to Christ. Prayer is how we call out to God. He is calling our name, just like He did to Adam and Eve. He knows what we have done, He knows what we are thinking, feeling, lacking and He can fix it all. When we can't hear God calling us, sometimes we are like Eve, and have convinced ourselves that God has said something that he did not say, and usually we run away and hide from God and allow our hearts to harden and our circumstances to seal us into separation and misery. But, it is never to late to come out of hiding and allowing God to take away our guilt, shame, blame of others and cloth us in His taylored clothes and cover us with the pure blood of His son Jesus Christ.
We can come boldly by the BLOOD! we have nothing to fear but fear itself. God is our power source, our strength and our desire is to be to please Him in all we are, all we think, say and do. When we unite all of our components mind, body and spirit with our passion it becomes us, and we are changed and new. Just like the Bible teaches....
I know because the Bible tells me so....! Study to show yourselves approved by God. Our salvation, our life, our enjoyment, our all is because of Him. Jesus said, the Father is in Him, and He is in the Father and whoever believes in Him is also Believing in the Father and that He is in them. Complete circle.
This was our history, this was our legacy and somehow over the years it has sadly been lost, changed, rejected, mistranslated into something quit harmful. But, when we go back to the source and learn the language of God's word we are able to understand and apply His words to our life, much like we received His breath. Stop doing it our way, stop making God fit into our plans and bringing Him on our path and trying to get Him to bless us in our plans instead of asking God to breath into our plans and move out anything that is keeping us from Him and bring us back into his presence and to take our dominion over the area and animals that He has called us manage for Him to bring Him pleasure while He provides for us and rewards us.
The "Empirical" Validation--- the scientific part---the sources and resources...
Roberts and Powlison give us the other important form of quality control -- biblical/exegetical quality control, insisting that a biblical understanding of persons be the basis for all our models of internal dynamics and care: "our endeavor will not be primarily to integrate, but to retrieve, evaluate, and communicate something originally Christian . . . we can expect that in the measure that we lose touch with our own psychology and replace it with one of the psychologies of the establishment or some conglomeration of them, we will lose touch with the apostolic faith." (Roberts, pp. 153, 171)
One cannot credibly claim to be maintaining a biblical philosophy of mind while consistently using the therapeutic methods of Freud, Jung, Skinner, and/or Rogers. Their non-biblical and often anti-biblical philosophies are deeply imbedded in their therapeutic methods, and end up dominating the process over time.
Listed below are seven biblical assumptions / biblical truths concerning humankind that any psychology, as a conceptual system, needs to include and embrace if we are to consider it a genuinely Christian psychology. Empirical support for these biblical truths follows in later sections of this proposal.
1. Human beings have been granted the ability and freedom to choose, and their choices matter. We are not utterly and mindlessly driven by forces within or without, as Freud and Skinner contended. We are usually aware of those times when we are behaviorally "out of control" (acting apart from conscious intention). Except for the most troubled among us, such experiences are the exception, not the rule in life.
The arguments of any deterministic system of thought can only be believed if we do not apply those arguments consistently, that is, turn them back in on themselves. As soon as we do, the supposedly thoughtful, well-reasoned arguments in the particular paradigm become mere unavoidable, unconscious, unreasoned expressions of instinct, intrapsychic dynamics, or conditioning and reinforcement -- the blind reactions of a driven animal that cannot logically be considered to be anything more than the blind reactions of a driven animal. As soon as we understand this existential contradiction (imbedded in any deterministic/fatalistic model), there is much less reason to take the content of the deterministic, human-as-driven-animal paradigm very seriously any more. Were Freud's theories involuntary, irrational expressions of his neuroses? When we read Skinner's books, are we only observing the inevitable results of his conditioning and reinforcement? If so, except as a matter of pure historical curiosity, why should anyone care about anything they said or wrote? If no truth is shared, if no reality is described, why not save our time, order another pizza and watch another football game? But then, this too would be an example of conscious, intentional behavior!
Unlike what we read in the works of Freud and Skinner, and other deterministic philosophers/psychologists, we experience ourselves and others as free to choose. We persistently and correctly believe we can make true and false statements, describe in detail at least some aspects of reality, and choose between right and wrong. Any fair analysis of human speech patterns reveals that very often (and very legitimately) we hold ourselves and others directly accountable for common behaviors. Consider these statements made by almost every parent, business manager, friend, officer of the court, and spouse on the planet: "Why did you do that, when I asked you not to?", or, "Why did you purposefully lie/mislead me?", or, "Please, don't stop trying! Don't quit on yourself! With just a little more concentration and effort, you'll make it!"
Many statements in Scripture, like Joshua's command (Joshua, Chapter 24), "Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve," and the Lord Jesus' challenge (Luke, Chapter 6), "Why do you call me Lord, Lord, but do not the things that I say?," no longer make any sense if we stop believing in the reality of human choice. The experience of choice is not an illusion, simply a naive and unscientific way of talking about brain activity, or a mere "emergent property" or "epiphenomenon," a mere by-product of brain activity. Rather, our ability to make meaningful decisions and to choose between differing paths is a basic reality of life, and one of the starting points for a Christian psychology.
2. Humans are basically rational creatures, doing most of what they do for a conscious purpose, instead of behaving aimlessly, or because they are routinely controlled by powerful unconscious motives. Even though they often choose to turn away from truth, and do what is destructive, humans are generally portrayed in the pages of Scripture as capable of sorting between alternatives, and behaving purposefully. Most of us have, at one time or another, been surprised by the strength or direction of an emotional response rising up out of our "heart," our "subconscious," our "limbic system," or whatever we want to call our deep emotional center. Emotions that surprise us should indeed be taken seriously, and their psychological as well as physical roots should be examined. But, these emotions should not and normally do not lead us, because emotions per se, that is, just by themselves, are completely blind.
3. Because they are capable of making real choices, and are rational beings (at least potentially), humans are morally accountable. One cannot read the Bible honestly without the message of moral accountability coming through "loud and clear." The Bible confronts us with a concept we do not much like, the concept of sin -- not "illness" due to "unconscious conflicts," but sin. Humans often attempt to dodge this concept, and all other forms of accountability, through any number of manipulations and maneuvers, but they cannot. Unlike what Jung and Rogers proposed, we humans will answer specifically for the choices we have made to Someone other than ourselves. We do not get to serve as our own final judge. Romans, Chapter 1, makes it clear that all human beings are "without excuse," fully responsible for their behavior to the Creator of the universe.
If we continue to follow modern psychology's lead into the darkness of mindless irrationality (Freud and Skinner), and / or its lead into the darkness of individually defined moral codes (made to look oh-so-attractive by the "self as God" models of Jung and Rogers), we will utterly destroy the family, the criminal justice system, the educational system, and the business / commerce system in this culture. We cannot operate as a coherent society without believing that we, individually and collectively, are essentially rational beings, and morally accountable to Someone other than ourselves. Without the concepts of choice, rationality, moral accountability and social responsibility, our mental "illnesses," differing "reinforcement histories," and conflicting "interpretations of experience" will continually collide with one another, and in the end, we will witness cultural collapse.
4. Humans wrestle with a divided nature, the elements of which war against one another. While we live in our natural bodies, we will deal with this tension. While he was simply wrong on so many points, Freud (like the Apostle Paul long before him) was more correct than Jung or Rogers on this point, in that we will continue to wrestle with a divided nature, no matter how "congruent" we think we are, or how successfully we believe we have integrated our personalities, partly through ''making friends with our Shadow." Insight alone will not free us from experiencing a divided nature. Our natures need continuous changing, not continuous analysis. Because of our divided natures, discipline, obedience, and thought/behavioral accountability continue to be necessary in the righteous life, even with the powerful assistance of the Holy Spirit, apart from Whom we would have no hope.
5. Humans are very valuable, yet very fallen, creatures. Human beings are not the "zeros" of Skinner's scheme (conditioned bits of protoplasm, responding mindlessly to conditioning and environmental stimuli), but they also are not the innately loving, helpful, angelic beings of Rogers' scheme who only need to be "liberated" or "empowered" in order to discover and reveal their wonderful natures, and then do wonderful things. Humans are valuable not because they say so, but because God says so, and took action to secure their redemption. Nearly every morning newspaper confirms that we humans, if given the opportunity, will often use power in unethical and destructive ways, using power against (instead of for) one another. The kind of "liberation" many of us need is not liberation from virtually all external constraint, but liberation from the undisciplined meanness and foolishness of our own natures. It doesn't take a genius to understand that not all of our problems come from outside of ourselves. Frequently, the source of our problems is housed in our own souls. The familiar phrases, "we have become our own worst enemy," and "we have met the enemy, and they are us" ring truer than we wish they did. Chapters 7 and 8 of the Epistle to the Romans address this problem of a corrupted nature, and show a way out.
6. Personal salvation cannot result from the application of psychological technique. It is the gift of God. In the past few decades many attempts have been made to (in essence) substitute the temporary and partial gains of psychological therapy for the eternal gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. Sadly, this is happening within churches, as well as within more secular outlets for soul care. As contemporary churches have become increasingly psychologized, they have often given up their most important functions -- to call all humans to turn from sin, to surrender to the salvation that is possible through Jesus Christ alone, to seek His Kingdom and His righteousness, to become His disciples, and to train His disciples. Instead of celebrating the unique and central role of Jesus Christ in the personal salvation of every person who receives the eternal gift, many contemporary churches have instead offered up carefully choreographed, "feel-good" morning services, self-empowerment support groups (of all kinds, for all ages, and both genders), and numerous recreational options, while often neglecting to teach and live out the message of Redemption. Instead of acknowledging and celebrating the power of the Gospel to transform the self, and to call us into something greater than service to the self, morning sermons in many modern "seeker friendly" churches often offer little more than self-enhancement strategies (e.g. -- "How to Feel and Perform Better by Developing Your Self-Esteem"). But, people don't need more of this shallow pop psychology, particularly from the pulpit. People need the Lord -- a real, deep, personal encounter with Jesus Christ, His people, His Kingdom, His righteousness.
There are no psychological techniques, or sets of techniques, that can substitute for the work of Jesus Christ and bring about personal salvation. This is as true for cognitive restructuring and behavioral contracting as it is for psychoanalysis, analytic psychology, operant behaviorism, or client-centered therapy. Cognitive restructuring and behavioral contracting (the modes of therapy advocated in this proposal), by emphasizing transpersonal truth, mutual encouragement, and real accountability, at least have the strength of being more in line with the true needs and nature of human beings -- as portrayed in the biblical understanding of human beings -- and thus may help indicate the need for, and contribute to the outworking of, the process of redemption. In the models of Freud, Jung, Skinner, or Rogers there is no transpersonal truth, or real, external accountability. By leading us away from transpersonal truth and real accountability, the paradigms of the principal founders of the traditional psychotherapies can only lead us into darkness.
7. Real meaning and life direction are needed in people's lives, and they come from God's special calling to and for each one of us. Perceptive theorists and therapists, like Erik Erikson (1968) and Viktor Frankl (1963, 1965), have correctly affirmed that people cannot live successfully, long-term, without meaning and direction in their lives. But, they (Erikson and Frankl) do not state with unequivocal clarity where real meaning and life direction come from. They come from God's specific calling to and for each one of us. Our sense of meaning and direction needs to be grounded and real. It needs to be grounded in God's plan for Creation and Redemption, not just a personal fantasy, not just something we make up to make ourselves feel significant. Freud and Skinner both wrote that any sense of meaning, direction, or significance is ultimately an illusion. Their position is very dark indeed, but their nihilistic position ultimately has more consistency and integrity than Jung's and Rogers' position that meaning, life direction, and personal significance are all self-defined, and can be whatever a man or woman want them to be.
We were made to have and enjoy creative and meaningful relationships with other persons, with ourselves, with the natural world, and with our Creator God. If any psychological paradigm and/or its methods of therapy cause clients to turn away from, misunderstand, or in any way distort these vital relationships, then there will likely be more soul-damage than healing in the end. This will tend to hold true, even if the clients' presenting symptoms diminish over the course of initial psychotherapy. Not all psychotherapies are finally good for the suffering and vulnerable persons to whom they are applied!
Any therapeutic approach worthy of a biblical/Christian label will emphasize what the Scriptures emphasize -- encountering and responding to truth, renewing the mind, accepting and extending consistent encouragement, all within the context of rationality, conscious intentions, and mutual moral/behavioral accountability.
(Accountability Psychology: BiblicallyConsistent, Empirically Validated Psychology/http://www.christiancounsel.net/BIBL_PSY.html )
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Christians using psychology and Larry Crabb's book "Connecting" reviewed by
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/xn-psych.html
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