Growing up within a Roman Catholic family, the personal religious background that
I encountered featured the opposition of any integration between scientific
knowledge and sacred knowledge. Thus, to suggest that psychology and theology
could be integrated was to insult the core beliefs of my family. In other words, the
beliefs were centered around "the church often portrayed as antiscientific, stuck in
its narrow-minded ecclesiastical view of reality, in which any evidence that
appears to be at odds with the prevailing view of Scripture is simply dismissed"
(Entwistle, 2015, p.23). Therefore, counseling and psychology were more
anthropocentric than theocentric; God was not the center or amid any issue;
instead, it was a personal conflict that God was absent.
As a first-generation Christian, those beliefs have been altered due to completely
living with a God-centered faith. Rather than a here and now approach, the
perspective deals with eternal well-being for God's purpose upon a person and a
redemptive worldview. Similarly, David N. Entwistle writes, "the truth that every
vocation should be a calling into full-time Christian ministry in which we serve God
and others with whatever abilities He has gifted us and in whatever positions we
may find ourselves" is a core belief that every counselor should stand by
(Entwistle, 2015, p.12). My religious background views the integration of sacred
knowledge as a necessity to understand scientific knowledge. I agree with the fact
that "the trueness of scientific claims was based on theological arguments" as well
as "integration is intra-personal" because the counselor should be a representation
of Jesus and know the root of the problem, which is the fall of humanity (Dr.
Scalise, 2021). However, I also agree that "both Christian thinking and secular
thinking can be done well or poorly. In fact, bad Christian thinking might be worse
than good secular thinking in some aspect" because one should be careful to
separate the secular from sacred, which is not what God intended (Entwistle,
2015, p.10). To summarize, sacred knowledge is the root of understanding any
scientific knowledge
Reference
Entwistle, D. N. (2015). Integrative approaches to psychology And Christianity: An
Introduction to Worldview Issues, philosophical foundations, and models of
integration. Cascade Books.
Scalise, Dr.E. (August, 2021). Worldviews and Christian Counseling [Lecture
recording]. Canvas@Liberty University.
https://canvas.liberty.edu/courses/117651/pages/watch-worldviews-and-christian-
counseling?module_item_id=13237292
