EMCAPP Journal 2

6 And at the same time, there is no good reason that Chris- tians should not continue to co-labor with modernists and postmodernists on research, theory-building, and practice in areas where their world-views do not conflict. Contrary to the opinion of fundamentalists, Christian psychologists will want to read and dialogue with modern and postmodern psychologists, since they have produced such a great volume of valid psychological information, and good Christian psychological science will be promo- ted through such stimulation. While, from a Christian standpoint, contemporary modern psychology has its li- mitations and blind spots, a fair assessment will apprecia- te its great erudition and rich vocabulary for describing an enormous amount of psychological detail lacking in eve- ryday speech (including the everyday speech of the Bible and the Christian tradition). This scientific sophistication has greatly furthered our understanding of some features of human nature that were previously understood only in broad outline in the Christian tradition (like reason and emotion), but it has also discovered many other features basically unrecognized by humans of any age (like neural networks, attributions, and separation anxiety). Without such dialogue and reading, a Christian psychology would be immeasurably and unnecessarily impoverished (a pro- blem that one would think would concern God, since he is the Creator of these phenomena!). On the other hand, many Christians in psychology in re- cent decades began their work with a modern psychology already developed by secularists, and then sought to in- tegrate faith to that version. However, because of the way the task was set up (e.g., the psychology was already pre- formulated according to secular standards of rationality), it was not really permissible to develop Christian models that were qualitatively different from the secular versi- ons. In contrast, Christian psychologists should engage EMCAPP Eric Johnson, Ph.D., is Professor of Pastoral Care at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the director of the Society for Christian Psychology. Eric edited Psychology and Christiani- ty: Five Views and wrote Foundations for Soul Care: A Christian Psychology Proposal. ejohnson@sbts.edu References Calvin, J. (1960). Institutes of the Christian religion (F.L. Battles, Trans.). Philadelphia, PA: Westminster. (Original work publis- hed 1559) De Silva, P. (2001). An introduction to Buddhist psychology (3rd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. Kalupahana, D. ((1987). The principles of Buddhist psychology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Kuyper, A. (n.d.). Principles of sacred theology. Associated Pu- blishers and Authors: Wilmington, DE. Kuyper, A. (1998). Abraham Kuyper: A centennial reader (J.D. Bratt, Ed.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Naugle, D.K. (2002). Worldview: The history of a concept. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Rygal-Mtshan, Y.-S. (1987). Mind in Buddhist psychology. Ber- keley, CA: Dharma Publishing. Stroud, B. (1992). Logical positivism. In J. Dancy & E. Sosa (Eds.), A companion to epistemology (pp. 262-265). London: Blackwell. Watson, P. J. (1993). Apologetics and ethnocentrism: Psycholo- gy and religion within an ideological surround. The Internatio- nal Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 3, 1-20. Welwood J. (2002). Toward a psychology of awakening: Bud- dhism, psychotherapy and the path of personal and spiritual transformation. Shambhala. in their dialogue and reading of modern psychology with greater hermeneutic sophistication, careful to do so more critically, interpreting modern psychological discourse more Christianly, in terms of and in light of another set of texts: primarily Christian Scripture, and secondarily, the Christian tradition and contemporary Christian psycholo- gical literature. Is there any place here for integration? Of course. However, in order for it to contribute to a Christi- an psychology, such integration must be subordinate to a higher agenda: the construction of a Christian psychology, guided throughout by Christian world-view assumptions. It is of course possible that the project of a Christian psy- chology will come to nothing. However, without attempt- ing anything, we will never know. What would happen if Christians in psychology were to spend a couple decades taking the Scriptures and the Christian tradition more seriously than any other texts, and develop a psychology based on those resources, doing research and theory-buil- ding and developing counseling practices accordingly? Of course, we cannot pretend that modern psychology does not exist—nor should we—but it will undoubtedly require considerable energy to break free of our Babylonian capti- vity to modernity, in order to real progress in understan- ding human nature from a Christian standpoint (in cont- rast to the more traditional Christian approach of simply baptizing secular psychological models with, at best, a meager reference to some Christian considerations). This more radical project seems worthy of our efforts. Given the distinctiveness of Christian world-view assumptions and the fact that a Christian psychology should be able to incorporate all the valid insights that modern psychology can make, we should expect that a Christian psychology will yield a rich and novel version of psychology, but one that is ultimately more valid and comprehensive than that which modernism alone can yield. Let‘s give this project a few decades and find out.

EMCAPP Journal 2

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