Psychology for Christian Ministry

Rebecca Nye, Sara Savage, Fraser Watts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415240376
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134551569
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

This introduction to psychology has been devised for those training for and working in the clergy. Ideal both as a professional handbook and a textbook, it covers social, developmental, educational, occupational and counselling psychology, as well as the psychology of religion. It carefully considers the processes of personal change and growth central to religion.

Part 1
Personality and religion

1 Spirituality

QUESTIONS FOR MINISTRY

• Do you have to be a ‘spiritual giant’ to have a spiritual experience?
• How common are spiritual or mystical experiences?
• What is their meaning in people’s lives?
• Why don’t more people talk to the clergy about their religious experiences?
• What happens to me when I pray?
• Is it selfish to pray for myself?
• Is authentic spirituality necessarily emotional?
• What are the key elements of ‘spiritual direction’?

‘Spirituality’ is currently one of the most popular aspects of religion, and religious people often attach a great deal of importance to the inner, spiritual life. Furthermore, non-religious people are often sympathetic to broadly spiritual values and practices, even when they have little room for orthodox religious beliefs or the institutional church. In this chapter, we will approach the psychological aspects of spirituality from three perspectives, looking first at the concept of spiritual experience, then at the psychology of prayer, and lastly at psychological aspects of the spiritual path.

Spiritual experience

Though the concept of ‘spirituality’ is attractive to many people, it is also controversial. In its modern sense, it has developed only over the last two hundred years, and it reflects a growing divorce between the private and the public, and between the religious and the secular. Spirituality is the non-secular, non-public aspect of religion. What some object to in the concept of spirituality is the way it focuses on the private aspects of religious life to the exclusion of other aspects of collective and cultural life. Though there is a long and varied history of writing on Christian spirituality (see Jones et al. 1986), some would argue that we tend to misread this historic tradition from the vantage point of a more recent preoccupation with private religious experience (e.g. Turner 1995).

One of the most important influences on contemporary conceptions of spirituality has been William James, whose Gifford lectures in 1901–2 on The Varieties of Religious Experience caught the mood of his time and have exerted a continuing influence. James’ position is seen clearly in his emphasis on ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’. This formulation reflects his emphasis on feelings and experience, with nothing about beliefs and knowledge. He also emphasises the individual person, and sees collective religious life as very secondary. Note also his attempt to avoid any explicit assumption about the existence of God by invoking the formula ‘whatever they may consider the divine’. It is an approach which implies a very broad concept of religious experience. However, James is cautious about following through the implications of his definitions and finds it ‘convenient’ to settle for what people conventionally mean by religion.

Despite the influence that James has exerted, his views have been criticised from the outset, for example by von Hugel, for their neglect of the role of corporate Christian life. Criticisms have continued to be advanced from both philosophical (Proudfoot 1985) and theological (Lash 1988) points of view. Proudfoot’s approach can be illustrated from his comments on the four hallmarks of mystical experience that James enumerates. James’ four hallmarks are that such an experience is:

• Ineffable (i.e. cannot adequately be described in words)
• Noetic (i.e. imparts knowledge)
• Transient (i.e. a brief, passing experience, not a continuous state)
• Passive (i.e. an overwhelming experience that happens to the subject)

Proudfoot sees these so-called characteristics of mystical experience as ‘social constructions’ rather than reliable reports of what the experience is actually like. For Proudfoot, the fact that people describe mystical experiences in these ways is largely due to their having been trained to do so while preparing themselves for mystical experience. Rather than taking their descriptions at face value, he asks why people invoke them. For example, he suggests that people call mystical experience ‘ineffable’, not because they can’t describe it but because they think that one should not try to do so.

This raises general issues about the nature of ‘social constructionism’. There is no doubt that terms like ‘ineffable’ and ‘noetic’, like all words, are in a sense products of our collective attempt to understand and talk about the world. However, it is a big step beyond that to suggest that they are mere social constructions and that they do not actually describe mystical experience.

Lash has been particularly critical of the idea of ‘pure’ or ‘direct’ religious experience. Many accounts of religious experience suggest, in some way or other, that those concerned are penetrating the veil that normally shields us from ultimate spiritual realities, and seeing things as they really are. Lash wants to emphasise, in contrast, that all experience is shaped by language and culture, and this must be true of mystical experience as well. The idea that such experience is ‘direct’ is thus exposed as an illusion.

Another point of dispute concerns whether religious experience is essentially the same in different faith traditions, as James and other ‘perennialists’ would suggest, or whether it is significantly different from one faith tradition to another, reflecting the impact of different sets of beliefs on the nature of mystical experience.

There has been a vigorous response to critics of the Jamesian view by Forman (1990). Forman wishes to take seriously the idea that in mystical experience there is a core of absolutely pure experience that is the common core of various mystical traditions. However, it is perfectly compatible with this position to accept that, when describing such experience, people inevitably interpret it in ways that reflect their cultural background and faith tradition.

As so often happens, debate here tends to become rather polarised, and it is worth stating an intermediate position that has some plausibility. Let us accept that all experience is to some extent shaped by its cultural context, and that it is impossible to escape that context absolutely. However, let us also accept that there is something unusual in mystical experience in that it goes further towards escaping cultural context than normal experience.

It would be helpful for the debate to generalise less sweepingly about mystical experience. For example, there is probably an important difference between apparently spontaneous mystical experience, and experience arising from meditation or other practices. The social constructionist critique fits induced much better than spontaneous experience.

Though this is essentially a theoretical debate about psychological processes, it is also regrettable that it generally proceeds without any reference to empirical psychological research. However, there are a number of research findings which, if not decisive, are relevant to the debate. David Hay, in a survey conducted at the Religious Experience Research Unit in Oxford, asked people: ‘Have you ever been aware of, or influenced by, a presence or power, whether you called it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?’ As with similar surveys in the USA, he found that about a third of the population reported such experiences (see Hay 1990).

One of the most interesting aspects of the survey concerns how such experiences relate to religious orthodoxy. He found that 24 per cent of atheists/agnostics reported such an experience, a proportion slightly less than that found for the general population, but not massively so. More relevant than the orthodoxy of people’s religious beliefs, or whether or not they went to church, was how important they thought ‘the spiritual side of life’ was. Of those who regarded it as very important 74 per cent reported religious experiences, compared to only 11 per cent among those who thought the spiritual side of life was not important.

Such findings are not easy to interpret. At first glance, the fact that a substantial proportion of atheists and agnostics have mystical experiences seems to suggest that enculturation is not particularly important. However, it might be argued that in our culture virtually everyone, even atheists and agnostics, have imbibed a certain amount of cultural predisposition to such experiences. Another interpretative problem with such data is that it is hard to know what is cause and what effect. Religious belief might influence the likelihood of people having a religious experience. On the other hand, it is possible that religious experiences incline people towards religious belief. Without monitoring a substantial group of people both before and after such experiences, it is difficult to be quite sure in which direction the main causal influence lies.

Other relevant research is that of Ralph Hood (see Hood et al. 1996, Chapter 7), who examined mystical experiences using questionnaire methods. Particularly interesting in the present context is his finding that the terms people use to describe mystical experience tended to group into two main clusters. One seems to be concerned with basic aspects of the experience such as timelessness, spacelessness, unity, and ineffability. The other group is more obviously interpretative, describing their experiences as involving such things as a sense of holiness or the presence of God. This empirical demonstration that descriptions of mystical experience cluster into two groups is at least consistent with a two-component view of the experience, that is, the view that there is a relatively pure core of experience, but that this is surrounded by culturally mediated interpretations that vary from one faith tradition to another.

Similar issues arise in connection with the role of the brain in religious experience. Though research on this is at a fairly early stage of development, it promises to be an increasingly lively research area in the future. One of the best-known current theories about the role of the brain is that put forward by Michael Persinger (1987), to the effect that there is a similarity between religious experience and the experiences of people suffering from temporal-lobe epilepsy, and that the same part of the brain is involved in both cases. However, the research support for this idea is not good. Though it has often been suggested that people with temporal-lobe epilepsy are particularly likely to be religious, careful research does not support that. Also, there are important dissimilarities. For example, epileptic experiences are generally unsettling, whereas religious experiences tend to occur at a time of distress and to induce a state of deep peace or happiness (as Hay among others has found). The claim of similarity between the two kinds of experiences seems to derive from poorly designed research (see Jeeves 1997).

However, other more promising ideas about the relationship of the brain to religious experience are developing, for example in the work of d’Aquili and Newberg (1998). One attractive feature of their approach is that they distinguish between different facets of religious experience, and look for the different brain mechanisms that underpin them. Specifically, they have suggested that there is a ‘holistic operator’ that underpins the sense of unity in religious experience, and a ‘causal operator’ that underpins the sense of divine action in the world. Though this is a speculative theory, it is a pointer towards the kind of neuro-psychological theory of mystical experience which is likely to be developed in the coming years.

The main point at issue here concerns the implications of such research for the nature of spiritual experience. Persinger’s most recent research (e.g. Cook and Persinger 1997), involving the induction of a ‘sensed mystical presence’ by stimulation with magnetic fields, has led some to conclude that religious experiences can be explained away by such findings. The logic here does not follow – the perception of green light, say, can be induced in similar fashion, but this does not mean that green light is not real. Some might want to claim that spiritual experience was independent of the physical brain, and would see research on brain processes in religion as incompatible with the value they placed on religious experience. Others, less sympathetic to religious experience, might argue that the involvement of the brain implies that spiritual experience is ‘nothing but’ a spin-off of brain activity. In fact, the involvement of the brain seems to be neutral as far as the nature and validity of religious experience is concerned. It would be equally consistent with such research for (a) the experience to arise wholly from the brain, or (b) for it to arise from communion with God but to be mediated through the physical brain. From a theological point of view, the brain is part of God’s creation, and there is no reason why it should be bypassed.

There are thus many controversies and ambiguities surrounding mystical experience, including terminological confusions about whether the same or different things should be meant by terms such as ‘mystical’, ‘religious’, ‘transcendent’, ‘spiritual’ experience, etc. It may help to set out a list of five issues about religious experience.

1. Phenomenology
   The first question is how far such experience has a distinct phenomenological quality. For example, sensations may have an unusual brightness and immediacy, and there may be an unusual sense of all things being united together, and a sense of unity between the perceiver and the perceived. Such special phenomenological qualities are probably an essential requirement of experiences properly termed ‘mystical’, but not necessarily of ‘religious’ experiences.
2. The object of experience
   The next question is whether or not the experience is presumed to be of some special world or being, such as an experience of God or of the spiritual world. Certainly, this is sometimes assumed to be the case. However, it is also possible to regard religious experiences as a special way of seeing the ordinary world, rather than as an experience of a special world. There is a fundamental disagreement here between those who regard the presumption of a distinct spiritual world as essential to a proper understanding of mystical experience, and those who regard it as a confusion arising from a philosophically objectionable form of dualism.
3. Causation
   Various accounts can be offered...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Boxes
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Part 1: Personality and Religion
• Part 2: Development and Teaching
• Part 3: Counselling and Pastoral Care
• Part 4: Organisation and the Church
• Part 5: Psychology and Theology
• Afterword
• Bibliography