Modern Psychotherapies

A Comprehensive Christian Appraisal

Stanton L. Jones, Richard E. Butman

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780830864751
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

The wide variety of psychotherapies that psychologists and students of psychology face can make for a confusing picture. The level of complexity is multiplied for Christians since they must ask how a particular psychotherapy fits (or doesn?t fit) with a Christian understanding of persons and their suffering. In this expanded and thoroughly update edition, Stanton Jones and Richard Butman continue to offer a careful analysis and penetrating critiques of the myriad of psychotherapies now current in the field of psychology including: - Classical Psychoanalysis- Contemporary Psychodynamic Psychotherapies- Behavior Therapy- Cognitive Therapy- Person-Centered Therapy- Experiential Therapies- Family Systems Theory and TherapyTwo valuable new chapters have been added: "Community Psychology and Preventative Intervention Strategies" and "Christian Psychotherapy and the Person of the Christian Psychotherapist." Opening and closing chapters discuss foundational concerns on the integration of psychology and theology and present the authors' call for a "responsible eclecticism." Modern Psychotherapies remains an indispensable resource.Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) Books explore how Christianity relates to mental health and behavioral sciences including psychology, counseling, social work, and marriage and family therapy in order to equip Christian clinicians to support the well-being of their clients.

1

The Integration of Psychology and Christianity

Stanton L. Jones and Richard E. Butman

Christian counselors and psychotherapists are vitally concerned with understanding the human condition, fostering human flourishing and alleviating human suffering. Our field has arisen in a time when it is painfully obvious that improving our standard of living and our physical health does not guarantee anyone a sense of personal well-being. Far too many people are in emotional, mental or spiritual pain.

Out of a desire to improve the human condition and alleviate suffering, many Christians today are interested in the mental health fields. There is a strong desire to enrich Christian ministry by drawing upon the resources of the evolving field of psychology and its related disciplines. What thoughtful pastor or counselor would not want to use all available knowledge and techniques to make his or her people-helping as effective as possible?

But there is also considerable ambivalence about and outright opposition to drawing upon the strengths of psychology among some conservative Christians. Some describe the field of psychotherapy as “satanic” or “completely secularized” and “unredeemable.” While in graduate school, one of us (Stan) spoke to Jay Adams, the founding father of “Biblical Counseling.” I asked if he had any words of guidance for Christians studying psychology, to which Adams responded, in essence, “Drop out of graduate school. If you want to serve God as a counselor, you can only do so by going to seminary, studying the Word of God rather than the words of men, and becoming a pastor.”

Neither one of us took Dr. Adams’s advice. We have, however, tried to maintain our foundational commitments to Jesus Christ in our work as psychologists. This book is the fruit of the working out of that goal. It covers a significant aspect of what we believe it means to be a Christian psychologist, mental health professional, counselor or psy­chotherapist.

This book is about thinking Christianly about contemporary approaches to psychotherapy and counseling. We strongly believe that it is not enough simply to pray for clients, or to refrain from discouraging their spiritual sensitivities, or to have high ethical standards while the Christian psychotherapist otherwise uses the methods and practices of theories and methods derived from secular sources. Every theory or method of people-helping carries with it a system of beliefs, a way of seeing or understanding people: who they are, why they experience what they do, how they can change and what they should be aiming for in life. As Browning and Cooper (2004) put it, psychological science (and particularly the applied psychologies) “cannot avoid a metaphysical and ethical horizon” (p. xiv). These theoretical suppositions may or may not conflict with direct assertions of the Christian faith or with more indirect implications of the faith. It is because we feel that these theories of psychotherapy have often been either summarily dismissed or uncritically embraced by Christians that we have attempted to provide a balanced appraisal of these views from a Christian perspective.

In this first chapter we want to set our foundations by grappling with the core of how a religious faith should interact with the seemingly “secular” and “scientific” field of psychotherapy. Since this task is often called “the integration of psychology and Christianity” or of “psychology and theology,” the core of this chapter is a discussion of what integration means. We approach this in two stages, discussing first the general stance of the Christian toward “secular knowledge,” then moving to the more specific issue of our stance toward “psychological knowledge and science.” We will then briefly discuss criticisms from various directions of the integration movement and conclude with a discussion of the specific integration methodology we will use to appraise or critique the various approaches to psychotherapy.

How Does Christianity Relate to “Secular Knowledge”?

Being a Christian is easy when faith is contained in a “spiritual” corner of one’s life. But the living God has a mind of his own. Not being content with such limits, he often breaks out into the rest of our lives and lays claim to territory we had not yet thought about deeding over to him.

Often he first lays claim to our moral lives, with the result that we discover that being a Christian entails confronting and struggling with our selfishness, jealousy, anger, pettiness or rebelliousness. This often has implications for our vocational lives, such as when we must curtail unethical practices or when we must reassess the values that have energized us for years.

But God can lay claim to our thought lives as well. Do we need to think differently about politics, science, art, philosophy and indeed all areas of life as a result of our faith? Indeed we do. The claims of the gospel are all-inclusive, spanning every dimension of our private and public lives, because Christ has been declared the Lord of all (Col 1:15-20).

What does it mean for sincere Christians to relate their religious beliefs and faith to an area not overtly or obviously religious or theological? There is a distinctive Christian position on the nature of God and of salvation, but is there a correct Christian position on literary criticism, on thermo­dynamics, on the nature of human memory, on the fundamental motivations of human personality or on the nature of depression? Answering this general question on the relation of faith and scholarship or science has absorbed the energies of many Christian thinkers over the centuries.

This is not a new question. Thanks to the work of faithful believers over at least three millennia, we have abundant examples to follow in answering this question, examples that are too little known among Christian students today. Let’s begin with the Old Testament’s description of the “wise man” or “sage.”

Derek Tidball (1986) points out that in ancient Jewish society, before the coming of Christ, there were three types of “pastors”: priests, prophets and wise men. “The objective of the wise men was to provide down-to-earth counsel about the ordinary affairs of life” (Tidball, 1986, p. 43); thus, it seems to us that there are many parallels between the wise man role in ancient Jewish life and the role mental health professionals serve in contemporary American life. Tidball suggests that the wise men did not often provide their counsel according to explicit divine revelation; they were grappling with practical matters which simply were not a preoccupation of God’s revelatory energies. In other words, they dealt with matters for which no simple recourse to “the Bible says X” was possible. “Their approach was to consider, with steady logic, the truth which was hidden within human nature and creation in order to discover the regularities which could form the basis of their lives and counsel” (Tidball, 1986, p. 43). The provision of such wisdom is a prime duty of the Christian psychotherapist, for whom it is vital to remember, as did these wise men, that true wisdom begins with “the fear of the LORD” (Prov 1:7).

Tidball seems to suggest that there are two primary elements of the wise man’s or sage’s methodology: grounding their approach in God’s word in the Scriptures, and then searching in human experience with “steady logic” for enduring truth. In a recent volume Coe and Hall (2010a, b) also urged that Christian psychology be founded on following the model of the sage, and, like Tidball, seem to suggest the same two methodological elements. On this basis Coe and Hall argue that “the Old Testament sage’s psychology is not an act of integration; rather, it is one single, though complex, act of doing a science or psychology” (2010b, p. 155). Unfortunately, Coe and Hall are simply wrong that the work of the sage is not an act of integration in nature, and their specific citation of Proverbs 24 as a prototype of the work of the sage is helpful in establishing why.

Coe and Hall seem bothered that the integrationist turns to and engages secular sources of wisdom to expand our knowledge, striving to make sense of such secular knowledge within our deeper Christian intellectual commitments. But it turns out that this is exactly what the Old Testament sage or wise man did. In addition to being grounded in God’s Word and using steady logic about what we observe of human nature, the very Old Testament sages that wrote Proverbs and Ecclesiastes did what we are here calling integration.

The author of Ecclesiastes, thought by many scholars to be King Solomon, calls himself “Qoheleth,” which can be translated teacher, preacher or sage.[1] And in explaining his own methodology, he writes “He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. The Teacher [i.e., Qoheleth] searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true” (Eccles 12:9-10). Just how far-reaching was that search for proverbs by Qoheleth? Quite extensive, it turns out. Proverbs 24, as well as Proverbs 31 and other passages in these two wisdom books, are heavily influenced by pagan wisdom literature. As I argued elsewhere (Jones, 2011), it turns out that the sages who wrote the Old Testament wisdom literature were well grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures and skilled in steady logic, but also facile in the pagan, secular literature of the day. The sages who composed Proverbs were discerning editors and compilers, integrationists who appropriated good ideas from secular literature, adapted them and built on them.

Recognition that Proverbs 24 is just such a passage is so widespread that it has made its way into the notations of prominent evangelical study Bibles. The English Standard Version Study Bible notes that Proverbs 22:17–24:22 or “The Thirty Sayings of ‘The Wise’ ” reflects “an awareness of the Egyptian wisdom text, The Instruction of Amenemope, dated to about 1250 B.C. Clearly [the sage/author] did not slavishly copy Amenemope, but there are many affinities in content” (p. 1173; see also the New International Version Archeological Study Bible). Far from slavishly copying, theologian Daniel Treier argues that the sage/author always adapted what he drew from secular literature to godly purposes: “the most important features for interpreting particular proverbs [drawn from pagan sources] concern their recontextualization within or relation to the fear of YHWH, Israel’s God” (forthcoming, p. 113 in ms.; see also Waltke, 2004, 2005). So we have evidence already in the Old Testament of the value of appropriating secular wisdom to God’s purposes, if that work is done with due diligence to remain faithful to God’s revealed Word.

Let us now move into the New Testament era, the era of the church. Among conservative Christians today, many assume that a “Bible only” stance of antagonism toward “secular knowledge” is what has marked “real Christians” for two millennia. Often unwittingly, they adopt a posture mimicking one of the most prolific early church fathers, Tertullian (c. A.D. 160-220), who wrote (taking “Athens” as a metaphor for secular Greek philosophical wisdom and “Jerusalem” for the wisdom of the Bible as directly inspired by God):

What indeed does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the [philosophical] Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians? . . . Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the Gospel! With our faith, we desire no other belief. For this is our palmary faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides. (in Geehan, 1971, p. vi)

Sadly, Christians who adopt such a stance are unaware that Tertullian was himself a brilliant product of a broad, humanistic education in the very Academy he mocks in this quote, and that he drew capably and well on that broad background in service of the gospel as he wrote apologetics and theological works. In this quote he was engaging in a bit of preacherly hyperbole to make a particular point; the quote in isolation considerably exaggerates his true position on the value of secular knowledge.

It is more important to note that the early church never systematically embraced any such repudiation of secular knowledge. Indeed, engagement with secular knowledge has always been important to the church. Philosopher Arthur Holmes’s Building the Christian Academy (2001) gives an exceptionally readable introduction to this fascinating history. Holmes discusses how the earliest Christian liberal arts academy was established in Alexandria, Egypt, in the third century. The term liberal arts in the ancient world had nothing to do with today’s political liberalism. It was an ancient Greek term by which they distinguished the type of technical education suitable for slaves, whose job was to do specific tasks, from the education suitable for liberated peoples—the free citizens of the state, whose role was to guide the civic order by their wisdom and breadth of learning. As opposed to technical education, the liberal arts centered on the trivium (the three arts of language—grammar, logic and rhetoric or persuasion) and the quadrivium (the four mathematical arts—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). A liberal arts education was presumed applicable to everything; it ideally equipped the student to reflect deeply and critically on the current state of affairs, preparing the citizen to lead.

According to Holmes (2001), the first Christian liberal arts academy was established almost eighteen centuries ago for four reasons, reasons as relevant today as then: (1) to interact with the best thinking of unbelievers for the sake of evangelism and apologetics to reach nonbelievers with the gospel, (2) to learn from non-Christian thought, since clearly nonbelievers can think rigorously and well, and it would be arrogant of Christians to think that they have nothing to learn from non-Christian thought, (3) to worship and honor God, who is truth in himself and the source and the author of everything, by thinking broadly and well, and (4) to provide a holistic education of both mind and character, fostering growth both in intellect and in personal maturation, out of recognition that we are unitary beings whose minds are interconnected with our hearts and souls.

Holmes (2001) summarizes some of the high points of the Christian academy over the ensuing centuries. He mentions the great monasteries of the medieval period, where monks that loved God and loved knowledge preserved learning through the Dark Ages. There were direct connections between such monasteries and the establishment of the first great universities at Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, universities that began as training schools for clergy, yet were comprehensive in their curricula; the founders of these institutions originally saw learning as an outgrowth of sincere Christian faith and a liberal arts education as necessarily done in the context of Christian reflection on the subject matter.

Theologian Don Browning (2010) recently sketched one particularly pivotal moment in the church’s engagement with secular knowledge. For centuries the great thinkers of the church had focused on the writings of Plato for their dialogue with secular thought, but one millennium ago in Spain and Sicily, the medieval intellectual world was shaken and revitalized by the rediscovery of the texts of Aristotle. These texts had been lost in the Christian world but preserved in the Islamic world, and as these two worlds collided in Spain and Sicily, the texts of Aristotle became the focus of an intellectual dialogue among Islamic, Jewish and Christian scholars. This rich dialogue spurred forward the explosive progress of science and the humanities in the following centuries. The work of Thomas Aquinas, whom many consider the greatest mind ever to work in the Christian tradition, is clearly indebted to the fruits of this religious dialogue.

Returning to Holmes (2001), his next focus for discussion of the Christian academy is on the heroes of the Protestant Reformation, whose indebtedness to their engagement with secular learning is remarkable. John Calvin, for example, is often described today as a theologian, but in truth he wa...