LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Parameters of a Christian Psychology
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (Ed. D) Department of Christian Leadership and
Church Ministries
By
Mary Gracias
Lynchburg, Virginia
10/2022
Parameters of a Christian Psychology
Basic Teleology
The Bible emphasizes three basic directions of human nature: the need to honor, serve,
and depend on God as Father; the need to stand in a relationship of mutual dependency and
harmony with other human beings; the need to take care of the creation. Thus human nature is
basically “relational,” our well-being depending on relationships with God, our human fellows,
and the natural world that befit the nature of each of these. The Bible does not put these points
in terms of “needs”—that is psychological lingo. Rather, it represents God as commanding us to
love him with all our heart, and our neighbor as ourselves, and to be faithful stewards of the
creation.
But it certainly does depict us as created for these kinds of relationships, and as not
flourishing in the highest sense when we violate these commands. Thinking psychologically, we
would say that the symptoms of dysfunction that follow a disregard for God, or hatred or
indifference to one’s fellow human beings, or a failure of proper stewardship of nature, come
from being at odds with our very nature as persons. These are not just affronts to God,
humanity, and nature, but an assault on ourselves, a denial of our true selves and our deepest
needs.
Love of God
The need for God is evidenced in the near ubiquity of religious worship among human
beings. The Apostle Paul interprets the Athenians’ motive for making an altar to an unknown
god as a sort of groping after the true God, and he quotes a pagan poet approving as having
seen (through a glass darkly, no doubt) that in God we live and move and have our being (Acts
17). The Christian will see evidence of the need for God in the “archaic” demand, that Heinz
Kohut notes, for a perfect ideal self object, and in the claims of people like Anselm and
Descartes that we are equipped with an innate idea of a perfect being. William James
comments: the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self, of
a self that is least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion,
if such companion there be. This self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent
Me that I seek.
This judge is God, the Absolute Mind, the “Great Companion.” ...The
impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the
empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate
Socius in an ideal world. (James, 1950, pp. 3115-16) Carl Jung is famous for exploring universal
themes, which he takes to have broadly religious significance, in the mythologies, symbols, and
dreams of culturally diverse peoples. The psychotherapeutic power of religious experiences,
noted by some psychologists, is also evidence.
Augustines’s “our hearts find no peace until they rest in you” (1961, Book I, Chapter 1) is
the classic statement, and again we have Jung: During the past thirty years, people from all the
civilized countries of the earth have consulted me...Among all my patients in the second half of
life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort
was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill
because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers,
and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. (Jung,
1993, p. 264)
Never mind that all these evidences can be interpreted otherwise than as supporting a
God libido in the human psyche. Never mid that Jung takes his observations, not as evidence of
our need for God as Christianity conceives him, but as indicating another “God” that sometimes
seems identical with the larger human Self. In underdetermining the conclusion, and requiring
certain framework for its evidential force, this evidence is not so different from other evidence
in the social and natural sciences. Christians, at any rate, will see these facts and similar ones as
evidence of our need for the Father of Jesus Christ.
Love of Fellows
Some need for human fellowship is widely acknowledged even by the most individualistic
psychologies. Rarer is assent to a need for the kind of fellowship that Christianity calls for—one
in which we deeply identify with others, weeping with those who weep and rejoicing with those
who rejoice, dying to self in humility for one another’s sake, bearing one another’s burdens and
laboring in harmony, yoked together in the service of one greater than we. Non-Christian
psychologists are likely to see “enmeshment” and an immature lack of “individuation” in the
social relations that, in the Christian view, the human psyche needs. (For an exception to this
generalization, see Boszormenyi-Nagy & Krasner, 1986.)
This disagreement reflects, of course, a different vision of what human beings basically are
and need, a vision likely to intimidate Christians if we are not very clear about our own
psychology. Is there any evidence for the Christian view? We do fairly often see an
approximation to the kind of mutual identification that the Bible calls “love” operating in
families, and I think it is pretty clear that a sort of fulfillment exists here, in this belonging and
self-giving service, that is lacking in more instrumental relationships (see Martin, this volume).
We might also point to the therapeutic power of a biblically faithful congregational fellowship,
which often is a powerful kind of psychotherapy.
Nurture of Nature
Christians will see evidence of the stewardship tendency in the familiar circumstance of people
taking unpretentious and unacquisitive joy in tending their gardens, growing livestock, and
keeping pets. In its most immediate form this stewardship involves hands in the dirt and on the
plants and animals. Stewardship can and must take the form of management, but it seems to
me that psychologically such management must be based, in the individual memory, on
immediate nurturance of natural things. In the Christian psychology, people find fulfillment in
this respectful, responsible use of nature because they themselves are natural beings, but are
also “little less than God” (Ps. 8:5), quasi-creators themselves, appointed to this responsibility
by the Creator. The stewardship need finds fulfillment neither in the worship of nature nor in
the heedless rape of it. Romantics who find in nature a vital spiritual force and a source for their
own personal vitality are not wrong, though they may recognize less clearly than they ought
that the wonder of nature derives from the beauty of God. The capitalist idea that we own our
pieces of nature and can do with them whatever we please is a perversion of stewardship. This
is dominion, all right, but a falsely absolute lordship.
We will no doubt want to explore other basic tendencies of human nature that are posited
or suggested by the biblical witness. The fact that human beings are made in the “image” of
God the Creator suggests exploring, in biblical terms, the human tendency to acts of creation—
especially artistic and technological inventions. Paul Vitz emphasizes (see Vitz, 1987a) the
human fulfillment that comes from pursuing parenthood, biological and otherwise, suggesting
that we also image God’s status as Parent. And Rebecca Propst (this volume) explores the way
that a dialectic between individuality and sociality reflects the relatedness within the Holy
Trinity.
