The Science of Virtue

Why Positive Psychology Matters to the Church

McMinn, Mark R.

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493411214
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

Christianity Today Book Award Winner
Outreach Recommended Resource of the Year (Counseling and Relationships) The church and science have drifted apart over the past century. Today the church is often deemed irrelevant by those who trust science, and science is often deemed irrelevant by those whose primary loyalties are to the church. However, this book shows that the new science of virtue--the field of positive psychology--can serve as a bridge point between science and the church and can help renew meaningful conversation. In essence, positive psychology examines how ordinary people can become happier and more fulfilled. Mark McMinn clarifies how positive psychology can complement Christian faith and promote happiness and personal flourishing. In addition, he shows how the church can help strengthen positive psychology. McMinn brings the church's experience and wisdom on six virtues--humility, forgiveness, gratitude, grace, hope, and wisdom--into conversation with intriguing scientific findings from positive psychology. Each chapter includes a section addressing Christian counselors who seek to promote happiness and fulfillment in others.

1
Wisdom

The day before I started this chapter I played flag football with some of my doctoral students. Though I am thirty years their senior, I tried my best to keep up for three hours of great fun. Today my sore muscles scream any time I try to move. My wife, Lisa, would say they are reprimanding me for my foolishness. Typing on the keyboard is about the only motion that doesn’t hurt. It seems both fitting and paradoxical to begin writing about wisdom the morning after punishing my body in the name of a good time. Hopefully I haven’t just destroyed any credibility I have on the topic.

Football is a small example, but doesn’t it seem we need vast amounts of wisdom to understand and participate well in contemporary life? Picture concentric circles, starting with individual choices and extending outward to our memberships and civic responsibilities. In each of these circles we yearn for wisdom. Individually, we continually confront questions about how to best use our time in an age when consumerism and entertainment demand our continual attention. We make choices about education, training for careers, choosing careers, changing careers, and retiring from careers. How should we earn, spend, and give our money? If we have too much to do, and likely we do, then how should we balance sleep, leisure, work, and domestic chores? And why do we keep misplacing our phones and keys at the most inconvenient times? How are we going to lose a few pounds, and how much does it matter that we do? Is this just a third glass of wine, or is it a drinking problem? Am I reading a legitimate email or another scam? Should I even open the attachment, and if I do will it install a virus on my computer?

Moving outward on these concentric circles, many of us exist in family units that call for yet another level of wisdom. Honoring parents, loving a partner well, keeping children safe in a complex and violent world while raising them to be kind and compassionate, creating a balance of closeness without becoming overly enmeshed, knowing when to set rules and how many to set with adolescent children. Who purchases and prepares the food? How can we make ends meet in financially lean times?

Many live in small communities, with friends and neighbors who may delight or annoy us, or both. When do we set boundaries, and when are we just being selfish? Do we reach out to our friends and neighbors when we’re in need, or do we manage things on our own? How do we respond when others reach out to us with their needs? Some of us are part of church communities where we have to decide how important ideological and doctrinal differences are in relation to unity in Christ. Because many churches are dwindling these days, we face a host of questions about how to stay relevant in a postmodern world and when efforts to be relevant cross over to moral compromise.

Stepping back to see the larger concentric circles, we see that we belong to civic groups, whether city, state, nation, or world. Making sense of our voting rights and responsibilities and knowing how to prioritize candidates’ views on issues of personal morality, national security, economics, and social justice are no easy tasks. To whom do we offer our charitable giving when our resources are finite and the local and global needs seem infinite? Everywhere we turn, every day we live, we are people longing for wisdom in a complex world.

Social scientists have been studying wisdom, which is good news to some, irrelevant to others, and perhaps bad news to the science skeptics. As one who has spent my career valuing contributions of science, I aim to foster a relationship between what science helps us discover and what faith has long told us about wisdom. By putting science and faith side by side and letting them influence each other, we can construct wisdom for daily living.

The Science of Wisdom

One of last night’s flag football players, Paul McLaughlin, walked into my office three years ago, announcing that he wanted to do a dissertation on wisdom. “That’s a great topic,” I said, “but psychologists don’t really study wisdom.” Paul went to the library and proved me wrong. It turns out psychologists have been studying wisdom for at least three decades now. Much of the work has come out of the University of Chicago and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. I’ve read quite a lot about wisdom over the past three years, Paul and I published a paper on the topic, and Paul completed his dissertation on wisdom.1

Sometimes I look enviously at chemists and imagine that the constructs they study have clear definitions based on numbers of carbon molecules and the types of bonds they share. I’m probably wrong about the simplicity of chemistry, but still I can’t imagine a more difficult construct to define than wisdom. If we asked a hundred people to define wisdom, we would likely get a vast array of perspectives, ranging from shrewd financial advice to spiritual practices to a decision-making model for whom to marry (and whom never to marry).

Paul Baltes, a world-renowned expert on developmental psychology and founder of the Berlin Wisdom Project, considered wisdom to be “expert-level knowledge in the fundamental pragmatics of life.”2 Note that wisdom involves knowledge, but is not the same as knowledge. You may know immense amounts of information about healthy living, but if you neglect the fundamental pragmatics of eating well, exercising, sleeping, and experiencing joy in the present moment, then your knowledge will not be of much benefit. Wisdom goes beyond knowledge by applying knowledge to the pragmatics of living well.

Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg makes a similar argument that knowledge must be applied in order for wisdom to show up, but reminds us that this is not just about self-interest: “Wisdom is involved when practical intelligence is applied to maximizing not just one’s own or someone else’s self-interest, but rather a balance of various self-interests (intrapersonal) with the interests of others (interpersonal) and of other aspects of the context in which one lives (extrapersonal), such as one’s city or country or environment or even God.”3

Knowledge itself isn’t enough. We probably all know relational experts who struggle in their own intimate relationships. Perhaps they are pastors or counselors or psychologists with a vast amount of knowledge on how we should relate to others, but they struggle with practical ways of applying their knowledge in maintaining close, lasting relationships. Wisdom requires both knowledge and pragmatic application of that knowledge, and it extends beyond our self and into the realm of caring about others.

I recognize that these definitions of wisdom may not fully satisfy Christians, philosophers, or those who are generally suspicious of scientists, but let’s stay here for a while before moving to a more nuanced Christian understanding of wisdom.

Because science involves measurable criteria, it is not enough to simply define wisdom as expert-level knowledge in the fundamental pragmatics of life. We need something more specific and measurable. Scholars at the Berlin Wisdom Project articulated and tested five criteria that fit within their definition: factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, life-span contextualism, values relativism, and managing uncertainty.4 The first two—factual and procedural knowledge—are considered basic criteria in that they reflect the knowledge necessary for wisdom, but they are not sufficient in themselves. The remaining three criteria are about the pragmatic application of knowledge to a particular situation.

These five criteria can be illustrated with a silly story, though the silliness won’t be clear until the story is done. Many years ago our pet cat, Frisky, ran away when we agreed to dog-sit for a few days. Frisky “belonged” to my daughter Sarah, though it seems reasonable to question whether a cat can actually belong to anyone. We assumed Frisky was just hanging out in the woods around our house and that he would return at the conclusion of our three-day dog-sitting stint, but he didn’t. Ten days passed, and then one day after work Lisa told me that she saw Frisky lying dead on the side of the road on her way home from graduate school.

The first part of wisdom is factual knowledge. When we didn’t know Frisky’s whereabouts, we didn’t have many options for moving forward in wisdom. But now, with Lisa’s revelation, we had factual knowledge, and we needed to figure out how to be wise. Our daughter’s beloved cat was dead, and she didn’t know.

The next part of wisdom is procedural knowledge. When X happens, Y is the best thing to do. Procedure knowledge comes with time and experience. Because I was raised on a farm where we would have never considered having an indoor pet, I was quite uninformed about procedural knowledge when it comes to dead pets. Lisa, who was raised with one or more dogs in her home, knew much more in this regard. She helped me understand that the best thing to do when one’s pet dies on the road is to bring it home and bury it. So on that rainy autumn evening, after our three daughters were in bed, Lisa and I went and found Frisky, put his body in a cardboard box, dug a hole under a big Douglas fir tree, and buried him. I’m sure some would say the best procedural knowledge would be to show Sarah Frisky’s dead body and let her hold him once more before the burial, though that wouldn’t have worked out well in this case because Frisky wasn’t very presentable or even clearly recognizable due to the work of maggots—a point that becomes relevant later on.

Sarah was in early elementary school at the time and was (and always has been) a sensitive soul who sees pain in others and experiences her own pain deeply. We knew that telling her about Frisky would affect her profoundly. We also knew that this would not be the last time she experienced loss and pain. Part of wisdom is life-span contextualism—recognizing that each of us is living out a story with a past, present, and future. We had no idea at the time that Sarah would someday confront the unwanted failure of a nine-year marriage, with two young children at home. All we knew was that Frisky’s death would be a huge loss and that more losses lay ahead. We had to tell her.

The fourth criterion for wisdom is values relativism. This is not a sloppy pluralism, but rather the notion that most tough decisions involve competing values. In this case, we would have loved to shield Sarah from pain, which is an honorable value for parents to hold. Parents often endure hardships for the sake of their children. At the same time, we value honesty and see the importance of open, candid conversation with our children. These values competed, but Lisa and I knew that it was best to let Sarah know what happened to Frisky and to allow Sarah the pain of her grief. We flanked either side of her bed as we told her the story, and then each of us held her hand or touched her shoulder as she sobbed and writhed in pain.

The final criterion is managing uncertainty. Wisdom requires us to stop short of answers sometimes and to be willing to confront the paradoxes, mysteries, and unknown dimensions of living. Sarah certainly faced her share of uncertainty in the days that followed, an...