Is Integration between Christianity and Psychology possible?
Is integration between Christianity and Psychology possible? Or, how does Christianity relate to
Psychology? This quest is undertaken from the perspective of a Christian mental health therapist who is
concerned with articulating Christianity in the therapy room for the client who is interested in Christian
counseling. I also address this in hopes of engaging other Christian therapists who want to be
thoroughly Christian in their therapeutic practice while remaining relevant and while using the
psychological language of the day.
In my years of experience both as a pastor and a therapist, I have observed three 3 discernible
approaches to relating psychotherapy with Christian theology.
1. Rejection - This sector of the Christian community tends to be suspicious of language that suggests
the science of psychology, preferring rather to preserve the language of the Bible in their counseling. As
a result, this group often does not take into consideration the findings of psychology when it comes to
counseling. Generally, they view psychological problems as spiritual problems. So, they prefer to limit
their counseling language and concepts to ones which flow from the Bible such as faith, Holy Spirit,
flesh, world, salvation, sanctification, justification, redemption, atonement, demons, angels, sin,
holiness, forgiveness, etc. Therefore, rather than find a point of contact with the world, they often reject
psychology and its categories of thought altogether.
2. Immersion – Those who immerse themselves in the psychological culture claim Christianity as their
religion, but despite good intentions, do not adhere to the core of Christian ideas. Those who immerse
themselves in the psychological language and culture are often unaware of the ways in which some of
the fundamental concepts of psychology are at odds with Christianity. They usually steer clear of
conservative interpretations of the Bible. Those who reject and those who immerse are often at odds
with each other. The immersionists often accuse the conservatives of being judgmental while many
conservative Christians consider the immersionists as worldly and accuse them of selling out the
Christian faith in favor of the “ways of the world.”
3. Syncretism – A third discernible group seems to make a whole-hearted effort to hold psychology and
faith together. They often incorporate meditation, prayer, forgiveness, Bible reading, faith toward God
and acts of love in their therapeutic interventions. In spite of this good-faith effort, many Christian
therapists who seek to merge their psychological education with Christianity, often unknowingly accept
basic goals and premises of modern psychotherapy which fall short of or come in direct conflict with
Christianity and the present reality of the Kingdom of God.
As a way of addressing this problem, I will propose a Biblical approach to resolving this conflict. I will
take three test cases in the Bible in which God engages the people of Israel, encouraging them to walk
counter-culturally, against the grain of the values and beliefs of the nations and cultures around them.
God’s way of communicating His upside down, counter-cultural kingdom is to begin with the culture and
the people as they are in their specific setting, and use certain components of this culture to reveal
Himself and His will to them. He does this in numerous ways, but I will describe three of them.
When God gave the people of Israel the 10 commandments, He did so in a world that had laws. Israel
was not the first nation to have laws. God used what was available in the broken world to communicate
something about Himself and to communicate His will for humanity. Since the nations had laws, He
began with this. In doing so, however, he radically transformed the laws into a revelation of Himself.
The first three commandments forbid idolatry, and pronounce the God of Israel as the One and only God
of the entire universe Who shall not be depicted by anything physical. This was a radical departure from
and an exploitation of the existing laws of the day. The 10 commandments did not tell the whole story
of God or His will, but it was a beginning. Even earlier, God began to reveal Himself to the world
through Abraham. And he did this by using two already existing practices: the practice of sacrifice and
circumcision. But again, He gave them radically different meanings to reveal something of His nature
and His will to Abraham and his sacrificial love for the world. God uses whatever human situation exists
as a means to reveal Himself, His will, and the Kingdom He intends to establish.
A second situation in which God exploits the present-day culture is with the concept of Kingship. After
Israel was established in the “Promised Land”, they continued largely as a tribal people. Eventually, they
became increasingly concerned for their national safety and insisted on having a king like other nations
who could develop a military and defend them against outside threats. However, God opposed this. By
the simple fact that Israel opted to have a king rather than being led by charismatic leaders chosen by
God, they were in effect, rejecting God as their king. Because the people of Israel insisted, God
consented. But God warned them what would happen to them if they had a king, including
enslavement, heavy taxation, and forced labor.
God does not impose his will upon Israel, so he lets them have a king. But He begins to exploit the idea
of kingship and fill it with new meaning, meaning which reflects God’s own heart and nature. So, when
the first king that Israel chose failed, God chose the next king, who would become a prototype of a
future coming king who would rule the entire world forever. He chose David. David was described as a
“man after God’s own heart”. The characteristics of David which reflected this Godlikeness were things
like humility, kindness, fairness, justice, love, service of others, care for the weak and poor. This was
unlike the other kings of the world who used power, violence and intimidation to protect their national
interests. Of course, David was not a perfect picture of God’s character since he himself was also caught
up in killing, adultery and lying. But despite David’s imperfections, God used the primary godly
characteristics of David, the ones which reflected God’s love and justice, to reveal something about
Himself and his kingdom. From this point on the prophets would use the kingship of David as a way of
expressing the character of the coming Messiah who would ultimately come and set up a kingdom
which would last forever. The prophets foretold that the Messiah-king would come through the line of
David and would be called the son of David. But this king would not be a warring, powerbroker who
overpowered his enemies with the sword. He would not ride on a strong horse with sword, but “gentle
and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9). Again, God takes a piece of
broken humanity, the picture of a king which uses the sword as all nations do, and radically reframes it
into a picture of a Messiah-king who reigns not through violence, but through love, truth and service.
God, over and over again, exploited the broken pieces of the current world and put them back together
to be a picture which reflected His face in some way and pointed toward the Kingdom he wanted to
establish. In fact, God’s advocating of war in the Old Testament was a further manifestation of His
insistence of not forcing His will upon people, but using what he could in the world to accomplish his
plans. In Israel’s day, nations used violence and war, so God used this in order to demonstrate that
violence does not and will never establish an everlasting kingdom of safety, plenty and justice. And
when the time was right, he introduced, through the very idea of violence, a kind of king who would
conquer not with might but with love.
Then, finally God takes the ultimate step. He does not merely take the raw material of the world to
reveal Himself. He takes the plunge, and becomes a human being himself. God takes up residence
among us in the form of a real flesh-and-blood human being, fully human and fully God, but subject to
the world in all of its brokenness. In Jesus, we finally have the full revelation of God’s heart as well as
the revelation of human destiny: God in the flesh living among us in humble service and love. His love
culminated in death on the cross, the complete reversal of all human ideas for power, success and
security. And his self-sacrificial love and trust in His Father was completely vindicated by his
resurrection from the dead.
Now, what does all this have to do with the relationship between psychology and Christianity? As
Christians, we believe that the Bible contains The Message of all messages, the truth about human
nature and human destiny, and the way toward human fulfillment. But it is the task of each generation
of Christians to exploit the features of the culture we are given in order to express the gospel anew in
relevant ways. By doing this we make the Christian message accessible to the current culture and more
understandable by using the current features of the culture already present. Our times happen to be
characterized by a generation steeped in psychological knowledge and language. Our task then, as
Christian therapists, is to use the language of psychology and transform it, taking it out of its earthbound principles and goals, liberating it with the grace and truth of Christ, taking it up and out of itself in
order to be filled with new divine reality.
Also, the New Testament was written in a religious culture steeped in the language of the Torah, of sin,
flesh, the devil and the law. Our culture is not so much aware of sinfulness as much as we experience
isolation, depression, insecurity, anxiety, relationship conflict, etc. Our proclamation of the Christian
message should address these problems rather than try to convince people, first, that they are sinners.
This was an error of Pietism and still influences the theology of much of the churches today. Focusing
the gospel on these needs does not diminish the reality of sin and does not mean we are taking sin
lightly. The awareness of sin can become something that occurs secondary to experiencing the grace of
Christ as we target these other areas of pain. As any effective therapist does, we begin where the client
is, not where they are not, just as God does with his people.
To summarize this initial blog regarding the relationship between Christianity and Psychology, my
conclusion is that Christianity must relate to psychology in terms of exploitation, exploiting the best of
psychological language and ideas to communicate the core of the Christian message. What form this
exploitation takes will be revealed in future blogs. In the next several blogs I will attempt to describe
the human condition, human destiny, and human transformation from a biblical perspective. But I will
seek to do so in psychological language. The primary tensions between psychology and Christianity will
not emerge as much when discussing the human condition as it will when we discuss what the Bible has
to say about the transformation of the human condition (what the Bible calls “salvation”). By way of
introduction to the next several blogs, Christianity will exploit psychology in this way: We move from
self-sufficiency and accomplishment to trust, from self-esteem to grace, from mutual respect to selfsacrificial love, from success to the kingdom of God, and from strengthening the ego to killing the ego
and being reborn as a new emerging self liberated from self-obsession.