Science, Religion, and Health

The Interface of Psychology and Theology/Spirituality

Ellens

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781532601774
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychology and theology interface at four levels: theory development, research process, data collection, and clinical operation. At each level they connect in the model of humanness (anthropology) forming and functioning there; and in that model of humanness it is in personality theory that psychology illumes theology and that psychology illumines theology. A theologian who does not take full advantage of the way psychology illumines theology is not serious about the work of theology. psychologist who does not take full advantage of the way theology illumines psychology is not serious about the field and practice of psychology. Science, Religion, and Health explains in readable style how that interface and mutual illumination works, and why it is crucial for Christian psychotherapists and pastors.

1

Reflections on Human Health

Thinking about human health is a stimulating and mystifying matter. It stimulates the mind, drawing one into the marvelous scope and variety of human life and function, as one begins to realize that the issue of health touches and takes in most of the experience of being human. It is immediately apparent not only that one must always be either healthy or unhealthy in body, mind, and psyche, but also that there are an incredible number and quality of ways in which one can be sick or well. Yet it is impressive that those ways in which humans get sick tend to fall into very stereotyped patterns. From that point of view, the number and variety of ways people can be pathological seems finite, typical, and relatively predictable.

On the other hand, we have our own individualized style of being ill or well, that is, of reacting to, managing, or carrying our health and/or our illness. We are so typically human and yet so surprisingly unique, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. Likewise getting well can usually be achieved in surprisingly prescribed ways, yet each human does it with an intriguing distinctiveness. That is why it is also mystifying to speak of human health. Humans are or are not healthy so remarkably variously; and as if that did not sufficiently complicate the matter of what health is and how it is achieved, the variety of definitions of health in professional literature and in the popular mind is legion.

I remember I was fourteen when I first came genuinely to grips with the issue of what health is. It was during my sophomore year in high school. The quest was stimulated by a rather wide-ranging course in general biology. I was a small, rather neurotic, withdrawn, intense, and anxiety-laden, shy, pubescent boy. I was at least semi-conscious of the fact that I was maturing extremely late. I am not certain whether the painfulness of body and psyche that seemed to dominate my experience is typical for early adolescence, whether it was mainly physical or psychological, or whether it was healthy at the time. What I do remember is that it stimulated my thinking about health at the same time that it mystified me.

The quest came rather quickly to something helpful: an applied definition of health. I have no idea which supplemental text we were using. It may have been one of those weekly student journals that were so popular in schools at the time. In any case, it simply said that health is the state or condition in which a person can carry out a normal pattern or program of work without experiencing inappropriate pain. The teacher was impressed that I had caught that. I was astonished that no other student had. The teacher was suffering from a chronic illness, and the other students were rather robust and beyond puberty. Perhaps need prompted me to fix on the issue, which for the others had not come to mind.

Since then I have found that two things are true about health. First, most of us take it for granted when we have it. Second, this elementary definition is the best place to begin thinking about health. In this day of increasing emphasis upon holistic health care, the old positivist notion that health is essentially, if not exclusively, a matter of physical well-being, seems to be receding. Few professionals would now argue with the notion that health is more than physical well-being. Most readily agree that health involves also the interrelatedness of physical, mental, and social well-being. Even in the popular mind the holistic notion is genuinely gaining ground. These gains have been a long time in developing.

In ancient societies of the Near East from 3200 BCE to 1000 CE—in the cultures from which the West draws its sources and resources—Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman—the stress was on physical well-being and prescriptions for physical hygiene. Matters that would be referred to today as mental hygiene or psychotherapy were largely related to the realm of religion. Emphasis upon physical health continued through the Renaissance and well into the eighteenth century. Horace Mann, first secretary of the board of education in the United States, emphasized as late as 1840 that educating for health as physical well-being was crucial.

In 1850 Lemuel Shattuck, in his Report on the Sanitary Conditions of Massachusetts, emphasized the need for preventive programs of disease control, indicating that health was more than the absence of disease. However, his orientation remained essentially shaped by the physical emphasis.

There were notable exceptions to this over the centuries. Already in Homeric times Asklepios in sixth-century Greece, and more specifically Hippocrates in the fifth-century Athens, placed considerable emphasis upon both physical and spiritual well-being, that is, on the health of soma and psyche. This emphasis was weaker in the Roman, Galen, since he focused more on the exclusively physical and not so much on the psychological and spiritual components of health and disease. In the early modern period it surfaced briefly in John Locke’s emphasis (The Locke Reader). He considered “a sound mind in a sound body” to be essential.

It was only after the two world wars of the twentieth century that notions of health as optimal well-being in body, mind, and relationships began to take palpable form. Out of that development came such definitions of health as the following.

1. Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

2. Health is that complete fitness of body, soundness of mind, and wholeness of emotions that make possible the highest quality of effective living and service.

3. Health is the quality of life, resulting from the total functioning of the individual, that empowers him or her to achieve a personally satisfying and socially useful life.

4. Health is the condition under which the individual is able to mobilize all his or her resources—intellectual, emotional, and physical—for optimal living.

Such holistic axioms take seriously the health-impacting significance of total personhood and do not underestimate the role that social relationships play in enhancing or defeating health. By the mid-twentieth-century the goal of health called not only for the cure or alleviation of disease. It called for even more than the prevention of disease. Rather it looked beyond, to strive for maximum physical, mental, and social efficiency for the individual, his or her family, and for the community.

The value of this perspective, as is generally recognized today, lies in the fact that it considers health in positive rather than negative terms. Health is not merely disease control, cure, or prevention. It is the achievement of a high level of wellness for all in the human community and for the community and its environment as a living organism. Health is a dynamic process, not a static state. It is a life quality into which humans grow on a continuum that reaches ever forward and upward, rather than a status which people can achieve and at which they can then lie dormant or quiescent.

Hence it becomes less significant to speak of healthy or unhealthy, and more meaningful to speak of relative levels of wellness. Physical, mental, and social well-being interact causatively and dynamically on the continuum from minimal to optimal wellness, as seen by most professionals and laity in the helping professions today.

A simple and direct link may be seen between the definition of health I encountered in 1946 and this holistic notion of health. Health as freedom from disease or pain is a notion that has in it the seeds of the definitions of health by J. F. Williams (2). He asserted that health is that quality of life that enables the individual to live most and serve best. Such a quality of life, instead of mere quantity of physical freedom from disease, inevitably includes the holistic concerns of body, mind, and spirit. Williams emphasizes that the health needs of persons correspond to those of nations: vigor, vitality, progress toward a better way of life, and absorption in the pursuit of objective causes that enhance growth in quality.

This emphasis on the intricate relationship between health and growth is crucial for understanding the primary concern of this book about the relationship between authentic spirituality, wholesome religion, and holistic human health. Since Francis Bacon’s revival and elaboration of Aristotle’s controlled scientific method, the modern era has thought about nearly everything, especially the exact and applied sciences, in cause-effect terms. That outlook and its inherent confidence in the human ability to identify, analyze, and solve problems in the world of physical reality has been a great boon to the development of health care and the medical sciences.

The techniques for employing the causative perspective in health care have evolved rapidly. The nineteenth century saw a cause-effect model that largely identified a single effect in human health and illness with a single cause, and vice versa. By 1920, following World War I, a second model was in vogue, taking a more comprehensive approach, recognizing the multiplicity of cause-and-effect factors influencing wellness and illness in humans. A solid advance was evident in epidemiology as regards recognition of the interactive forces in the multiple causes and effects. The social-ecological model had been born in which disease, for example, was seen to be the result of the condition of the host, plus the environment, and personal factors. The rise of Freudian psychology, replacing the old faculty psychology of the nineteenth century, was not insignificant in this development.

Since World War II and the rise of the World Health Organization (WHO), the multiple cause and multiple effect notion of illness and wellness has reached a relatively sophisticated level, taking with great seriousness the role of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Reflections on Human Health
• Chapter 2: Spirituality, Religion, and Science: Principles and Possibilities
• Chapter 3: The Interface of Psychology and Theology
• Chapter 4: Anxiety and the Rise of Religious Experience
• Chapter 5: The Biblical-Theological Underpinnings
• Chapter 6: The Psychodynamics of the Fall Story
• Chapter 7: Modern Notions of Human Nature
• Chapter 8: Consequences for Psychotherapy
• Chapter 9: Concluding Observations: Transference and Countertransference
• Afterword
• Bibliography