Psychology:
Science or Competing Religion?
Open your Bibles to Judges 8. We have been studying about Gideon. We finished looking at the mopping up
operation of Gideon following his battle, his defeat of the kings of Midian,
the Midianite-Amalekite coalition that had attacked and enslaved Israel for the
last seven years. At the end of that
campaign, as Gideon has the enemy in flight and had chased them across the
Jordan River he went to the towns of Succoth and Penuel, seeking aid and
sustenance, asking them for food and for provisions so that they could continue
the pursuit of the enemy, and in neither one of those towns did the people give
them aid. They were afraid of what
might happen if Gideon were not successful, which means they weren’t trusting
God at all, number one. Number two,
they had compromised completely with the enemy so that in their thinking they
were demonstration that they were no different from the pagan cultures around
them whatsoever.
Now we started there showing what the
right interpretation of the passage was in terms of its historical context but
then there’s some interesting applications from this. We had also seen that at the beginning of this chapter the Ephraimites
who were in the…you have two areas, the Cisjordan and the Transjordan; the
Cisjordan refers to the area of the land west of the Jordan; the Transjordan
is the area across the Jordan. The
Ephraimites were in the hill country in the center of Israel and they had come
down; Gideon had called them to protect the fords so that when the retreating
Midianite army came down there they could cut off their retreat and they did,
and they were very successful in taking out a large part of the retreating army
so that there were only about 12,000 left that made it across the Jordan and
Gideon is now in pursuit of them.
I made the point that the Ephraimites,
in many ways, represent believers who aren’t walking with the Lord but they
have an overt obedience to the Lord.
And they got their honor, Gideon praised them for what they did, but
nowhere else were they praised in Scripture.
Gideon, of course, is listed in the faith hall of fame chapter in
Hebrews 11. But those that crossed the
Jordan had completely sold out, they don’t even have the superficial or surface
obedience to the Lord; they’re not even trying to cloak their behavior in some
level of loyalty to God, they’ve completely sold out. And so when Gideon
returns we see in his reaction in Judges 8:16-17, he goes to Succoth and there
“he took the elders of the city and thorns of the wilderness and briers, and he
disciplined the men of Succoth with them.”
He took them out and he physically whipped them with these briars and
thorns, an incredibly violent action and then he went to Penuel and “he tore
down the tower,” the central tower in the city, “and he killed the men of the
city.”
Now to us this seems like a strong
reaction but Gideon is operating on divine viewpoint here, he realizes that
they are traitors, they’ve compromised with the enemy and so he has to remove
them so that they no longer have this negative influence in Israel. That’s his job as a judge; he is to root out
this paganism. Now he is not completely
successful and as we will see in the conclusion of this chapter, even Gideon ends
up taking the nation back into idolatry.
But the point of application which I’ve been stressing for the last two
weeks is that for the believer today we are to be engaged in this same kind of
seek and destroy mission in terms of human viewpoint in our own thinking, which
means we have to be able to identify the strands of human viewpoint thinking
that have infiltrated our souls, things that we have been brought up with,
things that we have been taught from an
early age that we think are almost fact, and in many ways are just sort of
truisms, they re things that are commonly accepted by our culture so sometimes
we think they are just common sense and yet we have to be willing to attack
them with doctrine, be able to go in to remove worldly thinking. This is the whole principle of Romans 12:2,
that we are not to be conformed to the world, that means our thinking is not to
be conformed and managed by the concepts and categories and vocabulary of the
world system of thinking, but we are to have our thinking renewed by
doctrine. So that’s the whole process,
is rooting out human viewpoint thinking and replacing it with divine viewpoint
thinking.
So by way of review to bring us up to where
we are: psychology is an insidious arrogance and is a competing religious
system. And I identified four basic
currents of thought that had infected our society and have dominated the
thinking of modern Americans since the middle of the 19th
century. Ultimately they are all rooted
in a subjectivistic view of life that came intellectually with the introduction
of Kantian thought at the end of the 1700s so that authority is no longer
located in some sort of objective realm, but now man is the ultimate reference point so that in essence
modern American culture and western society operates on the same principle that
the Jews were dealing with at the time of the Judges, and that is that man is
doing whatever is right in his own eyes, pure relativism. Absolute authority is determined by whoever
the individual wants to make it and I identified four strands of intellectual
thought that have affected all of western society.
The first is Darwinism, both in terms of
biological Darwinism and social Darwinism; social Darwinism was utilized by
Hitler as a rationale for the dominance of the Arian races and all of his
racism. It was also used by many of the extreme capitalists, robber barons of
the late 19th century. What
they did was they took capitalism and then they merged it with this survival of
the fittest theory from Darwinism, so that capitalism became extremely harsh,
and that wasn’t because capitalism in and of itself is that way but when it
became merged with this human viewpoint survival of the fittest type of overt
hostile competition mentality then it lost all sense of compassion and concern
for people as individuals and that created a lot of problems. It also became a rationale. Racism has been
with us always but it also became a further rationale for racism in America as
well and a lot of justification came out of that. So Darwinism was one strand that changed education. It changed everything, it’s tentacles reach
into every arena of our society.
The second is sociology, and just one
example of how sociological type of thinking affects us is in the whole church
growth movement. It’s the idea that you
go out and give people what they want, the marketing strategies of sales,
advertising, all of that is based on a sociological foundation and so when you
then take that, bring it over into the church and start running the church
according to those principles you have problems, you compromise.
Socialism, the whole philosophy of
social liberalism is based on the idea that man can bring in a utopic
state. So 19th century
social liberalism also is another major trend.
And the one we’re looking at is
psychology. We have to understand that
psychology isn’t some unified body of thought out there that if you have a
problem in life, you’re dealing with anything from drugs, alcohol abuse,
marriage problems, whatever, people think oh, the solution is to go to a
therapist. What I want you to
understand is there’s no single…if you go to a doctor, whether you go to a
doctor in Norwich or you go to a doctor in Providence or you go to a doctor in
New Haven, or you go to a doctor in L. A. or New York or wherever, they have a
set body of data, of scientific facts on cancer, on leukemia, on kidney
problems, on brain disease, physiologically based brain disease, that everybody
agrees with; it’s substantiated in the laboratory. But if you go to a therapist in New London they may be operating
on a mechanical materialistic view of man, or you go to a therapist in Norwich
and they may be operating on a rational emotive cognative therapy program; you
go to Providence and they may have some other thing, there are over 400
different philosophies and models of behavior and over 10,000 different
therapies, so it’s not monolithic.
And there’s no such thing as Christian
psychology because all Christian psychology is is Christians who try to baptize
various different secular theories and modify them a little bit with some
Biblical verses and some Biblical concepts.
The problem is it’s very difficult for most believers who are sitting in
the pew to wade through and you read somebody, you hear somebody and they start
quoting verses that sound like they support their theory in counseling and they
really don’t. I remember when I was a
student at Dallas Seminary these issues were sort of a hot issue on campus. A lot of us were talking about well, what role
does psychology or counseling have in the pastoral ministry; is it possible to
have a Biblical model of counseling or therapy and over the years I’ve looked
at almost every system put out by so-called Christian psychologists and junked
all of them. We had to take one
required course called pastoral psychology and counseling, taught by Meyer-Minirth,
the Meyer-Minirth are now quite famous, they have clinics all over the country,
they have a radio show on, I think it’s the Moody Bible Institute Radio network,
they’ve published dozens of books on Christian counseling and
psychotherapy. They were both
psychiatrists; a psychiatrist is someone
who has a medical degree plus psychological training, and they had a
strong medical model of problems, and I came out of that course, rightly or
wrongly, with the impression that most people just needed some drugs and they’d
be okay. Either that or I needed a
whole different degree in training if I was going to be able to help people in
counseling. And those are false
concepts that are communicate but these two men had training in Navigators (I
don’t want to run down Navigators) but they had some kind of superficial
training and they had really just sort of cut and pasted a lot of Bible verses
into their psychological system to give it support. But if you really stopped and exegeted the verses they used to
support their various points in their model you realize those verses didn’t
support that, but the average person in the pew or person struggling with
personal problems doesn’t know that.
They don’t have the Biblical training, the theological training to be
able to come in and take all of that apart to see what the problems are, and
it’s extremely confusing for some people.
Other people, they just have some sort of innate faith that it must be
okay because the pastor said it’s okay.
So what I’m doing here is trying to
challenge us with the fact that we live in an age, a psycho-therapeutic age, an
age of counseling where most of us don’t realize it but our vocabulary, our
categories and the very thinking of how we approach problems, personal problems
and marriage problems has been so heavily cloaked in psychotherapeutic thinking
that we aren’t even away of it. In
fact, I’m not even sure that the very idea of people coming in and sitting down
and talking with the pastor when they’re going through problems, I don’t mean
in the sense of advice, we all have times when we just need somebody who can
give us another set of eyes on our situation in our life, and need a little
objective advice, and that’s valid. But
the idea of coming an hour, maybe two-three hours over an extended period of
time where we go through talk therapy, which is the term for it, that that
whole concept is Freudian. And yet most
of us don’t think twice about that it’s been so inculcated in us from our
culture. So we’re trying to challenge
that with some evidence from the psychotherapy arena itself.
C. S. Lewis foreshadowed this, in his
book, Screwtape Letters, which is a
very…if you’ve never read Screwtape it’s a fascinating read because he uses his
imagination and writes this fictional account of this older demon, Screwtape,
or I think the older demon is Wormwood, I can’t remember right now, he’s
writing these letters to his young nephew who is just a novice getting ready to
start tempting Christian to try to get them off track, and so Wormwood is
telling his young novice just how to how to become successful at tempting
believers. And as you read through his
letters it’s somewhat convicting because you start realizing how many ways in
which we get off track and distracted in the Christian life.
One of his points of advice is this
one: “Keep his mind of the plain
antithesis when true and false, and keep him in the state of mind I call
‘Christianity and,’” Christianity plus. “You know, Christianity and the crisis, Christianity and the new
psychology, Christianity and the new order.”
And C. S. Lewis was somewhat prophetic
in this, he wrote this in 1941 but even then he saw the danger of adding psychotherapy
concepts and psychological concepts to the Bible.
William Kirkpatrick, who is a professor
of educational psychology at Boston University, writes: “It is true that
popular psychology shares much in common with eastern religion, in fact, a merger
is well under way. But if you’re
talking about Christianity it is much truer to say that psychology and religion
are competing faiths. If you seriously
hold to one set of values you will logically have to reject the other.” Now that is not something that is a popular
statement and that is accepted by even most Christians today, and Kirkpatrick,
I believe, is a Roman Catholic teaching at Boston University, so he is not
coming from an evangelical framework.
Yet he recognizes the competition that’s there.
We also saw that psychotherapy claims to
have an exclusive authority in an area where the Bible claims exclusive
authority, so there’s a conflict between systems of psychology and their truth
claims, and the Bible and its truth claims.
The very term “psychology” claims to be the study of the soul, and yet
the Bible claims to be the final and exclusive authority on matters related to
the soul, the problems of the soul and their solutions.
We have further seen that there are only
two solutions; there is the divine solution and the human solution and the
divine solution is derived from a study of God’s Word. That’s important; that’s what makes
something Biblical, because it is derived from exegetical study of the Word of
God and it is not Biblical just because it doesn’t seem to be contradicted by
the Bible; that’s unfortunately how must people want to define Biblical. The
Bible claims that it is sufficient and immutable, that means that God is able
to solve all of our problems and He gives us the information we need in the
Scriptures. The Church did not need to
wait 1800 years for Sigmund Freud to come along before people could begin to
have real happiness enjoying life. Yet
that is the unstated assumption of all psychology, is that until we learned
about talk therapy and until we learned about the unconscious and the
subconscious and how that influences behavior and parental influence and all these
other things, people really couldn’t find happiness and solve problems in their
life. And that just denies the fact,
what did Christians do for 1800 years?
Jesus said, “My joy I give to you, not
as the world gives to you.” That’s an
immutable promise of God and it’s not related to being able to understand the
ego, the Id, the super-ego, subconscious, unconscious or any other Freudian or
other psychological categories.
Scripture says, “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for
teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the
man of God may be adequate, qualified, proficient, competent and skillful, and
equipped.” That means he’s educated,
edified and prepared for every good work, not some, not a few, but every good
work. That includes marriage problems,
parental problems, problems with children, social interaction, everything. And the problem is if we don’t plumb the
depths of what Scripture is teaching then people will never understand these
solutions. And that’s the problem the modern
evangelical church has gotten into is sermons and Bible classes are so superficial
that they’re only scratching the surface of what the Scripture says and so the
sheep in the pew are left without an adequate understanding of grace, of God’s
solution, and how to implement it. They
don’t understand human behavior, they don’t understand the Biblical… the Biblical categories of psychology. Psychology is really an old word. Some of you are familiar with the Old
Testament Commentary by Keil & Delitzsch; well, Franz Delitzsch had a book
out, it came out in the mid-1800s called Biblical
Psychology and it was a study of all the terms related to the soul in the
Bible, terms like heart, mind, reins, and kidneys and trying to put together
what the Bible taught about the makeup of the human soul and how it function,
understanding that “the heart is deceitful and wicked above all things, who can
know it,” and building a view of human behavior based exclusively on the
Scriptures. And very few people do
that; that is basically…once Freud came along that whole approach basically
ended as far as the greater evangelical church is concerned.
2 Peter 1:3-4 states it even more
profoundly, “Seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything
pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called
us by His own glory and excellence. [4]
For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, in
order that by them,” by the promises, by the doctrines in God’s Word, “you
might become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that
is in the world by lust,” and those last two phrases deal with problem solving,
“that we become partakers of the divine nature,” that is we begin to experience
the joy of Christ, the peace of Christ, the thinking of Christ, and escaping
the corruption, that’s the problems, the stress in the world, stress is a
result of trying to solve adversity problems through sin nature human viewpoint
solutions, and the only solution therefore is the divine solution.
Further we saw that there is a fallacy
in the rationale that all truth is God’s truth, and that’s the rationale that’s
used, it sounds good, a lot of people repeat it but the problem is that the
“all truth” is just truth that’s derived on the basis of human empirical
observation and that can always change and it does change, there is always new
discoveries next week, next year, that invalidate or change or modify today’s
approaches and it’s not on the same level as God’s truth which is the immutable
revealed truth of God in the Scriptures.
Then we saw that there’s really no such
thing as Christianity psychology, and I read this statement from the Christian
Association for Psychological Studies, where they state: “We’re often asked if
we are Christian psychologists. I find
it difficult to answer since we don’t know what the question implies.” Now see, the average person in the pew
thinks there is such a thing as Christian psychology and here’s a Christian
psychologist who says we don’t eve know what the question implies. They go on to say, “We are Christians who
are psychologists, but at the present time there is no acceptable Christian
psychology that is markedly different from non-Christian psychology. It is difficult to imply that we function in
a manner that is fundamentally distinct from our non-Christian colleagues. As yet there is not an acceptable theory,
mode of research or treatment methodology that is distinctly Christian.” Now that ought to wake everybody up.
Furthermore we saw that psychotherapy
and psychology has become extremely popular in the last 20 or 30 years. One study indicates that in the early 1960s
14% of the U.S. population, that is 25 million of a total 180 million, had
received psychological services; 14% in 1960.
By 1976 that number had risen to 26%,” so from 14 to 26% by the mid
70’s, by 1990 at least 33%, roughly a third of Americans had been psychological
at some point in their lives and in 1995 the American Psychological Association
stated that 46% of the U. S. population had seen a mental health
professional. Some even predict that by
the year 2000; of course we’re past that by now, that 80% of the population
would have at some time or another been a psychology user. So that’s its popularity.
We continue our critique: another quote
from Dr. Jerome Frank, a researcher in psychotherapy states: “Psychotherapy is
the only form of treatment which at least to some extent appears to create the
illness it treats.” And that is part of
the problem is that we think it works and it really doesn’t, and I’ll have more
information as we go on. Now we’re at
point 8 where we stopped last time.
Point eight, we must understand that
psychotherapy, Christian or otherwise, is a web of belief systems and value
systems, value and judgments, similar to religion. It’s a web of belief systems similar to religion. Psychotherapeutic beliefs, as are all
beliefs, are based on faith. Martin
Gross in his book, The Psychological Society, writes, “When educated man lost faith
in formal religion he required a substitute belief that would be as reputable
in the last half of the 20th century as Christianity was in the
first.” Now what he is saying is…see
“educated man lost faith in formal religion” starting in the late 1900s with
the onslaught and the attack of liberal Christianity and the use of historical
criticism and all of the various methodologies that under gird liberal
Christianity, and as a result of that people rejected the historicity of the
Bible, they rejected the origins of Genesis 1-11, the origin of man, they
rejected the Biblical analysis of man’s problem as being a sinner because they
rejected the substitutionary atonement of Christ on the cross. They rejected the virgin birth, they
rejected miracles, all of that was part of the liberal mentality, liberal
Christian mentality in the late 19th century, and if you were
educated the thinking was that how could any educated man really believe in
demons or demon possession or healing like Jesus did, or really believe in the
Bible literally. So they began to
interpret the Bible in a lot of different ways and rejected the infallibility
of Scripture along with it.
So “when educated man lost faith in
formal religion,” or let’s put it this way, when educated man lost faith in the
fact that the Bible spoke to man’s condition with absolute solutions, what they
had to do was find another belief system for man to use to solve his
problems. The same thing happens in
Darwinism and evolution. Man wants to
know the answer to the question, where did we come from? If you throw out the Bible you have to have
some kind of alternative solution.
That’s why evolution inherently…inherently, it may have a scientific
rationale behind it, it may have a scientific or pseudo scientific basis but
evolution did not begin with Darwin, it didn’t even begin in the 19th
century, you can trace the basic ideas of evolution all the way back to
Aristotle and to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. Evolutionary concepts have to be there; in fact, Henry Morris in
his book, The Long War of God, traces
it all the way back to some of the creation epics of the Babylonians, the
creation myths of the Babylonians like in Enuma Elish, and the Gilgamesh epic,
because man has to have some explanation for origins once he rejects God and
the Biblical view of origins. The same
thing is true in understanding man and understand man’s problems; if you throw
away the Biblical solution, the divine solution then you have to have some
other rationale and solution, and so psychology, Freudian psychology is in the
realm of behavior the comparable intellectual system to Darwinistic
evolution.
Let’s finish the quote, he says,
“Psychology and psychiatry have now assumed that role.” Now this guy is not a Christian, these
aren’t Christians that I’m quoting for the most part, these are just secular
psychiatrists who are critiquing their own industry; they recognize that it is
a competing religious system.
Bernie Zilbergeld in his book, The Shrinking of America, Myths of
Psychological Change, writes, “Psychology has become something of a
substitute for old belief systems.
Different schools of therapy offer visions of the good life and how to
live it,” in other words, how to have peace and stability in life. “Those whose ancestors took comfort from the
words of God and worshiped at the altars of Christ and Yahweh not take solace
from and worship at the altars of Freud, Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis and a host
of similar authorities. While in the
past the common reference point was the Bible and its commentaries and commentators,
the common reference point today is a therapeutic language and the success
stories of mostly secular people changers.”
Now think about what he says in that
last comment, “the common reference point today,” the common thing that all
people in western culture have this, this is our worldly thinking, this is
cosmic thinking, it’s “a therapeutic language,” that’s why I keep making the
point that we have to watch our language, we can’t just find words that become
popular in culture and then try to import them in because they sound good, words
like self-image. Self-image originated
in pure secular psychological thinking based on the concept of a
mistranslation, by the way, or a misinterpretation of the passage when Jesus
says you have to love others as you love yourself. What Jesus is saying is the essential orientation of sinful man
is self-love, arrogance. And we have to
treat others as we would want to be treated; that’s what He’s saying. But in self-image psycho-babble you have to
love to learn to love yourself first, before you can love others, and if you
don’t love and accept yourself first then you can’t love others. Well, that’s just a perversion of the
Biblical statement and it’s a reversal, a complete reversal of the meaning of
the Biblical statement, and it imports, when you start using words like
self-image you’re bringing baggage with that; how’s that for a good
psycho-babble terminology. It’s
bringing with it a whole host of other concepts and ideas that we don’t
critically evaluate because they’re not on the surface. And the problem today is that most believers
are not taught how to think critically about the ideas around them.
Now when I say “think critically” I
don’t mean in some sort of negative hostile manner, that’s not what critical
thinking is. Critical thinking means to
be able to think about, evaluate, the ideas and the concepts that we’re buying
into and to be able to understand what the real issues are and evaluate them on
the basis of what the Scripture says.
See, as Zilbergeld points out, the common reference point today is a
therapeutic language and the success stories, that’s all the antidotes that we
hear about how so and so, this individual that we know had a marriage problem
and they went to this counselor and it really helped, so therefore it must be valid. See, that’s pragmatism, that’s another human viewpoint way of
thinking about things, if it works it’s right.
That’s not what the Bible says.
Pragmatism affects everything, that’s
another major trend of thought because you have so many people who build a
church of 5,000, 6,000 or 10,000 people and they say well how can you challenge
it, God must have blessed it. The point
is that anybody can go out there…there’s a lot of people who run cults who have
large churches. One of the fastest
growing cults in the world is Mormonism.
They don’t operate on Biblical principles at all; if you operate on the
principle that we grew a large church it must be God’s blessing then God must
be blessing the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and every other cult. So that’s just an absurd thing; you can have
all kinds of overt success but that doesn’t mean that God is the one who
developed it and maybe God is using you despite your human viewpoint and not
because of what you’re doing, because some of these folks are truly teaching
the Word and at least communicating the gospel; God honors His Word and so
people are being saved and a few happen to… you know, a blind pig finds an
apron every now and then. And a few
people actually do gain some spiritual truth but it is not because of the
framework of theology or teaching or philosophy of ministry inherent in these
ministries.
So psychology then, we see, is a
substitute religion. It is a substitute
religion, it is not simply some sort of social science that we can gain some
value from; it is a competing religions system. Dr. Jacob Needleman in his book, A Sense of the Cosmos, which I
find to be a somewhat ironic title in light of the fact that we’re talking
about cosmic thinking and worldly thinking in the believer’s system, he’s not a
believer, writes: “Modern psychiatry arose out of the vision that man must
change himself, and not depend for help upon an imaginary God. Mainly through the insights of Freud and
through the energies of those he influenced the human psyche,” that is the
human soul, “was wrested from the faltering hands of organized religion and was
situated in the world of nature as a subject for scientific study.”
Martin Bobgan who’s written an excellent
critique of Christian psychology called The End of Christian Psychology quotes
George Albee, the past president of The American Psychological Association who
states: “The old conventional sources of explaining the mysteries of human
existence, such as religion and science, no longer hold much water for a lot of
people. So people have turned largely
to psychology as one field which attempts to answer questions about the meaning
of life.” So psychology is not neutral,
it is a competing religious system.
Dr. Arthur Burton in his book, Encounter, writes, “Psychotherapy
promises salvation in this life in the same way that theology promises it in
the after life.”
Thomas Szasz, who’s written quite a
significant critique of psychotherapy writes in his book, The Myth of Psychotherapy, “Contrition, confession, prayer, faith,
inner resolution and countless other elements are expropriated,” that is from
religion, “and renamed as psychotherapy.
Whereas certain observances, rituals, taboos and other elements of
religion are demeaned and destroyed as the symptoms of neurotic or psychotic
illnesses.” So religion itself is
assaulted but some underlying ideas are ripped out, renamed, repackaged and
sold as psychotherapy and not religion.
In fact, Szasz goes on to comment about Freud, that “he was educated in
the classics. Freud and the earlier
Freudians remolded these images into and renamed them as medical diseases and
treatments. This metamorphosis has been
widely acclaimed in the modern world as an epic-making scientific
discovery. Alas, it is in fact only the
clever and cynical destruction of the spirituality of man and its replacement
by a positivistic science of the mind.
Not only is psychology and all of its systems religious in nature, it is
a religion that is antagonistic to Biblical Christianity.” Szasz goes on to say, “Psychotherapy is not
merely indifferent to religion, it’s not neutral, it is implacably hostile to
it. Herein lies one of the supreme
ironies of modern psychotherapy. It is
not merely a religion that pretends to be a science; it is a religion that
seeks to destroy true religion.”
So when I get down on psychotherapy and
counseling I want you to understand why this is wrong, what the significance is
and how dangerous it is to get involved in this because it starts confusing and
distorting our thinking and we started reinterpreting the Bible according to
categories, vocabulary and systems of thought that are anti-Biblical. And that is going to destroy the correct
interpretation of the Bible.
Tenth point; the foundational assumption
of psychology is a rejection of man’s fundamental problem as sin, and therefore
the fundamental solution is grace.
That’s what underlies the problem of all psychology. Even so-called Christian psychology, because
what’s happened is in Christianity psychology you have Christians who come
along and they buy into a system, a methodology and an approach, a model of
human behavior, that was develop on the foundation that man’s fundamental
problem is not sin and God doesn’t exist and God can’t solve the problem. So what they’re going to do is they’re
going to take this entire edifice, this entire structure that’s been built on
this false foundation and they’re going to take it and they’re going to try to
baptize it into Christianity and attach a bunch of Bible verses to it and try
to reshape that foundation a little bit so it’s not obvious. They’re going to just put some window
dressing on it so you don’t see that fundamentally it still rejects sin as the
fundamental problem. It’s not sin that’s the fundamental problem, even though
the Christian psychologist will talk about sin as the fundamental problem, he
then turns right around and will start using categories like unconscious and
subconscious and the reason you make these decisions is because of things in your
subconscious and that’s forcing you to do it.
That’s a denial of volitional
responsibility; you may or may not be volitionally conscious when you do
something, but we started doing it, in some way we were more volitionally
conscious. If you’ve got a problem with
alcohol when you first took a drink you were volitionally conscious that you
were making a decision to have a beer or have a scotch or bourbon or whatever
it was. And initially you were aware of
that but once it becomes a habit like any other habit, we’re no longer aware of
those volitional decisions. And so when
we’re 25 or 30 and now something becomes a problem we want to say oh well, I
don’t ever remember making a volitional choice here, it’s just something I feel
like I have to do. That’s a habit and
there’s a difference between a habit and some sort of psychological pressure
that renders us volitionally less responsible.
So the foundational assumption is a
rejection of man’s fundamental problem as sin and therefore the fundamental solution
as grace. In the book, How to Get Your Money’s Worth out of
Psychiatry, Herbert Lazarus writes: “Psychiatry has a quarrel with only
those forms of religion which emphasize the doctrine of original sin. Any belief that tends to focus on the idea
that man is inherently evil conflicts with the basically humanistic approach to
problems that psychiatrists must follow.”
So you can’t wed Christianity with any psychological system at all; they
are mutually exclusive. So once again
we see there can’t be any such thing as a Christian psychological system. As believers our whole concept of human
problems and solutions must come from the Bible and the Bible alone. We don’t need to get educated in
psychological methodology or solutions in order to be able to help people.
Point eleven; the rejection of the
doctrine of original sin and personal responsibility for bad decisions is one
reason that psychology is so popular.
People don’t want to be confronted with their sin. Allen Stone writes: “The psychologizing of
the American public has created an expanding market. As a result of this psychologizing of the American public people
who have marital problems, sex problems, problems with their children, who are
having psychological discomfort, increasingly look for psychological help. It’s an infinitely expanding market.”
And Tana Dineen in her critique of
psychology writes: “The expanding work force of the psychology industry relies
on its survival and growth on its ability to manufacture victims.” See, the problem isn’t that I make bad
decisions and that I’m a sinner; the problem is that I’m a victim and it’s not
my fault. And so we’re all victims and
we just have to get together and have some big warm group hug and we’ll all
feel better and go home and wasn’t it good to meet Jesus this morning. That’s really what underlies the methodology
and the philosophy of ministry in too many churches today. What they’re doing
in the pulpit and the way they structure their entire worship service has been
influenced by psychology, because we’re here to make people feel better, to
lift them up. And there’s nothing wrong
with leaving church and feeling encouraged and feeling positive but sometimes
when we go to church and we hear the truth and we hear doctrine and we realize
who we are as sinners that’s not pleasant.
We may not go home feeling good; we may go home realizing that God wants
us to change and we really don’t want to do that so I’d rather go some place
that makes me just feel good. That’s
why that is so much more popular than any kind of Biblical teaching. Besides, if you teach the Bible you have to
think and people don’t want to think, they just want to emote.
Point number twelve; the new religious
values of psychotherapy are distinctly anti-Biblical. Needleman in his work, I quoted from earlier, writes: “A large
and growing number of psychotherapists are now convinced that eastern
religions offer an understanding of the mind far more complete than anything
yet envisage by western science.” Now
let’s say you decide that you’re going to go to a therapist and you go to a
therapist and you don’t know what their model is or anything else and they’ve
taken eastern religious mysticism and they’ve given it all new terminology so
now it seems scientific and what you’re basically practicing is Hinduism in
your approach to live and its problems, even though you call it by some sort of
sanitized scientific name, are you still in Hindu? That sounds like a [can’t understand word] question, what’s the
sound of one hand clapping. Yeah,
you’re still a Hindu. And that’s what’s
happening is a lot of Americans have bought into eastern mystical ideas through
psychotherapy and that’s why a vast number of American, even Christians, are
practicing Hindus because that’s how they’re approaching life, is from a
methodology based on eastern mysticism and not Christianity and they don’t even
know it. With all these desperate…[tape
turns]
…thousands of troubled men and women
throughout American no longer know whether they need psychological or spiritual
help. The line is blurred that divides
the therapist from the spiritual guide.
We’ve confused psychology and religion; people are confusing it, they
don’t know what the solution is.
Nickelsen in her work on Shamanism, you know what a Shaman is, that’s
the modern sociological term for a witch doctor, Nickelsen writes: “What Freud
may have been practicing was an ancient form of magic.” What Freud used to do was he had a whole
bunch of little figures sitting his desk, and this was his normal practice, in
fact you could hardly see the desk because he had so many of these little
figures on his desk, so she writes about that practice: “What Freud may have
been practicing was an ancient form of magic in which consecrated statues representing
spirits or transpersonal powers would engage the magician in imaginable
dialogues.” See, he would talk back and
forth to these statues. These ancient
shamans “would engage the magician in the imaginable dialogues and supply him
with invaluable knowledge. Such magical
practices were well-known in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome and the very
statuettes that Freud owned may have been used for such practices by their
contemporaries.” They were ancient
antique statutes that had been dug up by archeologists.
Point thirteen; that most of the
American public thinks of psychology as monolithic, but there is no single
accepted model of what makes up a person or why a person has problems, or what
the solutions are. In fact, there are over 400 different therapeutic
approaches and over 10,000 specific psychological techniques. And there are new schools being developed
every year. Roger Mills, a psychologist
writes in an article, Psychology Goes
Insane and Botches its Role as Science, states: “The field of psychology
today is literally a mess; there are as many techniques, methods and theories
around as there are researchers and therapists. I have personally seen therapists convince their clients that all
their problems come from their mothers, the stars, their biochemical makeup,
their diet, their lifestyle, even the karma from past lives.” Now you’re going to go to a therapist, what
are they going to convince you their problem is? “The whole scientific basis for psychotherapy is a myth.”
We’ve gotten this idea that it’s
scientific, therefore it must be right.
Christopher Barden, a psychologist and a lawyer and the president of the
National Association for Consumer Protection in mental health practices writes:
“It is indeed shocking that many, if not most, forms of psychotherapy currently
offered to consumers are not supported by credible scientific evidence.” In fact, as we’ll see in a little bit there
is no evidence that psychotherapy even works.
Further he states: “Too many Americans do not realize that…” now this is
a man who’s a psychologist, he’s a lawyer and he’s the president of the
National Association for consumer Protection in mental health practices, he
says: “Too many Americans do not realize that much of the mental health
industry is little more than a national consumer fraud.”
In fact, Dr. Sigmund Kotch who was
appointed by the American Organization of Psychological Researches to direct a
study; subsidized by the National Science Foundation and this foundation
included 80 scholars who published their results in 7 volumes, Dr. Kotch
concluded: “I think it by this time utterly and finally clear that psychology
cannot be a coherent science.” Eighty
scholars, eighty psychologists published their results in 7 volumes and that’s
their conclusion.
Sir Karl Popper who is a scientific
researcher states that: “though posing as scientists, psychology had in fact
more in common with primitive myths than with science,” that “they resembled
astrology more than astronomy.”
Research psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey writes in The Mind Game, “The techniques used by western psychiatrists are,
with few exceptions, on exactly the same scientific plain as the techniques
used by witch doctors.” This is
shamanism, it’s a fraud. So we have
confidence in psychology? Give me a
break.
Point number 15; Martin Bobgan in his
book lists the following as false assumptions that have no Biblical or
scientific basis. Let’s run through
these; these are false assumptions that have no Biblical or scientific basis
but they derive from psychology. Don’t
tell me how many of these things have influenced your thinking.
A person’s unconscious mind drives
behavior more than his conscious mind chooses behavior; that has no Biblical or
scientific basis.
Furthermore psychologists will teach
that present behavior is determined by unresolved conflicts in childhood. There’s no scientific basis for that, that
present behavior is determined by unresolved conflicts in childhood. Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t have
conflicts in childhood and it doesn’t mean that we don’t have unresolved
conflicts in childhood. What it says is
that present behavior isn’t determined by that.
Furthermore, psychology asserts, with
not basis, that parents are to blame for most people’s problems. That doesn’t mean our parents were perfect
or that they didn’t have problems and maybe we ought to blame them for a lot of
things but they are not to blame for my problems and my bad decisions.
Fourth, environment is to blame for most
people’s problems. Adam and Eve were in perfect environment and they failed,
the problem is not environment, the problem is bad decisions.
Fifth assumption of psychology that is
false, people need insight into their past to make significant changes in
thoughts, attitudes and actions. We
don’t need to understand our past, we need to understand what the Bible says
and then apply it. That’s not to say
that the past doesn’t influence us; that’s where we develop bad habits and
everything else, but you don’t have to understand the past, you don’t have to
go back into your childhood and dredge up all kinds of stuff because our
memories are flaky anyway. You can’t
rely on them and I don’t know how many of you but I know I occasionally get
into knock-down-drag outs with my parents over things I remember happened one
way and they think it happened another way; now those are just silly
things. Our memories are funny things
so we can’t rely on them.
In fact, in the 80s it was real popular
for people to come up with regressed memories and go through hypnotic therapy
and they would come up with ideas that their parents were… and I repressed
this, and my parents were really involved in a demonic cult and I was a victim
of sexual abuse and they generated all these things and there were all sorts of
trials and finally the research started to come out by the early 90s that
psychotherapists could actually suggest, very subtly, just by the questions
they asked, certain memories and so there was this whole idea of repressed
memory syndrome which was rejected and I know of several families that were
just ripped apart and are still torn apart today because they had a son or a
daughter who couldn’t figure out how to apply doctrine in their life so they
went off into psychotherapy and got into repressed memory stuff and came back
and started charging their parents with all kinds of things and the parents
were shocked because they’d never even heard of half of the stuff, much less
practiced it.
More assumptions that we make about life
from psychology that’s false, the first five years of life determine what a
person will be like when he grows up.
That’s false. Now there are a
lot of decisions that we make in those first five years and there are a lot of
things that happen to develop mentally, but it doesn’t automatically determine
the rest of your life. That’s the
point.
Another false assumption, everything
that has ever happened to me is located in my unconscious mind. There’s no such thing as the unconscious
mind; you may have a memory, you may have a memory that doesn’t work very well,
you may not be able to remember it but that’s not the unconscious. The unconscious is a metaphysical category
developed by Freud. It’s a technical
term.
Third, people use unconscious defense
mechanisms to cope with life. No, we
use sinful habits to cope with life, that’s what the Bible says.
And last, this is fourth, people need
positive self-regard, high self-esteem or to feel good about themselves. People need to feel good about themselves to
make life work; that’s false. That’s
not Biblical; you don’t see the Bible talk about that anywhere.
And then the last two, Christians and
pastors need training in Biblical counseling in psychology to be able to help
people because just knowing the Bible is not enough for helping people with
serious problems. You would be
surprised how many people I ran into in seminary who really believed that,
including professors, that you need training in Biblical counseling and
psychology to be able to help people. No,
you just need doctrine. You just need
to understand the Scriptures and the Bible is enough! The Bible claims to be enough and to reject that is heresy.
And then the last one, I love this, alcoholics
anonymous was started by Christians and is based on Christian principles and is
necessary to help people overcome addictions.
Yeah, right?!!! They only have a 17% success rate. AA is really based more on paganism and
human pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps problem solving mentality than
anything else and that’s why its success rate is only 17%.
These are just some of the many false
assumptions that characterize our thinking, that we’ve bought into from the
culture around us.
Furthermore, point number sixteen; the
root of modern psychology is planted in thinkers who were anti-Christian and
anti-religious. The roots of modern
psychology, the roots are planted in thinkers who were anti-Christian and
anti-religious. Freud, Jung, Maslow,
Rogers were all not only…none of them were Christians, they were all
anti-Christian. Freud was a Jew who
hated the anti-Semitism of Christianity as it was expressed…who hated
anti-Semitism and that was identified with the kind of Christianity he grew up
with in Europe and so he hated Christianity because he thought it was
automatically anti-Semitic, and he was out to destroy Christianity.
Point seventeen; we have the problem of
pragmatism. We think it works, but does
psychology really work. Let’s look at
the facts. Researchers, some of this is
taken from articles that were written as early as 1952 and whose conclusions
are still not challenged…well they’re challenged but they’re not refuted. Many different studies have been done about
the results of psychology and these conclusions stand and some of them are
thirty or forty years old and cannot be refuted.
Number one; psychotherapy can and does
harm a portion of those it intends to help.
That was one of the conclusions in the handbook of psychology. Psychotherapy can and does harm a portion of
those it intends to help.
Point number two; there is no real
evidence that psychotherapy is effective, not one shred of solid evidence that
psychotherapy has ever helped anyone, that is psychotherapy in and of itself.
Point number three; the percentage of
positive results from people who go to therapy is no different from a placebo
effect. You know what a placebo
is? That’s a sugar pill. In studies they have done between groups
with similar problems, those who went through therapy and those who just got
together and did nothing, the end result after five years is that the same
percentage of people in each group had solutions. In other words, psychotherapy doesn’t do anything for you. It’s no different from anything else.
A fourth conclusion that they derived is
that training credentials and the experience of the psychotherapist are
irrelevant to the results. Whether
you’re talking about somebody who has two or three PhD’s from the highest
schools and has gone through all the training, the highest best psychological workshops
and has years and years of experience, the results that they have are
quantitatively no different from the results of someone who just has a masters
in social work and is out there in the field for the first six months and can’t
even get their own life together. What
does that tell us? That tells us that
there’s something…what all of these systems have in common, basically, that
I’ve observed is talking. First of all
talking, and secondly the counselor therapist begins to function as a substitute
friend.
Now the solution is that in the
Scripture it says not to “forsake the assembling of ourselves together” because
there’s something in the body of Christ called mutual encouragement. If you go through the New Testament there’s
all kinds of passages on what we are to do to one another. We are to admonish one another, we’re to
encourage one another, we’re to teach one another. Now I don’t take that “one another” as meaning just anybody we
don’t know; but we are to develop, we all develop a circle of friends, people
we can talk to, people we can be honest with, and just in the process,
sometimes, of talking solutions occur to us about how we need to apply doctrine
in things, so we need to have people to talk to. And in our modern society so often people are so busy they never
have time to develop any level of intimacy or talking with anybody. There’s no fellowship with one another. We see that emphasizes, even in the
introduction to 1 John, that we have fellowship with God, we have fellowship with
one another, there’s a mutual association there.
And I know that just when I’m working
through some things and I’m trying to figure out how to teach something or I’m
working through exegesis of a problem I’ll call up one or two guys I know who
also have training and we’ll just talk about things, and in the process of
talking it out we work out solutions.
That’s what all these systems have in common; that’s why they appear to
work for some people, is because they just need somebody to talk to and they go
and they talk and they work out…they see what the solution is and they work a
problem. It doesn’t have anything to do
with therapy or the models or the counselor or anything like that. The solution for the believer is clear; it
is the Word of God and the Word of God alone.
Now sometimes we may not immediately see how doctrine applies to our
solution.
That’s why we have the promise in James
1:5 that “if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God,” and that’s prayer,
that God the Holy Spirit will help us to see how the doctrine we have learned
applies to the problems or situations that we face so that we can apply it and
move forward and advance so that we can fulfill the principle of James 1:2, to
“count it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials because you
know that the testing of your faith produces endurance and endurance will have
its completing” or perfect “result in maturity.” That’s James 1:2-3. So
the solution is not psychology and yet we live in a society, we live in a culture
where the very words that we use so often to talk about people’s problems and
the solutions have been shaped by psychology and we’re importing at a subtle
level a lot of values that are anti-Biblical.
So just as Gideon came back and he
violently and aggressively went on a seek and destroy mission to take out those
who had compromised with the enemy, that’s what we need to do in our own
thinking. We need to learn doctrine and
we need to be involved in a seek and destroy mission in our own thinking to remove
human viewpoint and its influences from the way we think.