Codependence. No More!

I recently listened to a Mars Hill Audio Conversation called Self, Society, and the Diagnosis of Addiction in which Ken Myers spoke with sociologist John Steadman Rice (author of A Disease of One's Own: Psychotherapy, Addiction, and the Emergence of Co-Dependency) about the concept of codependency. Rice maintains that codependency is not an objectively existing condition like a disease but rather a discourse that people adopt in order to make sense of their lives, particularly to describe the relationship between the self and society. Codependency, then, is not something that people have but is rather a conceptual framework that people choose in order to account for intra- and interpersonal problems.

Rice went on to describe how widespread the concept of codependency has become and how its definition has broadened since its origin in recovery groups such as Al-Anon. Melody Beattie, perhaps codependency's greatest popularizer, offers the following definition of a codependent person in her Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself:

A codependent person is one who has let another person's behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person's behavior (Hazelden, 1986, p. 36).

Beattie continues by listing a variety of ways that codependency manifests itself including obsessive helping, caretaking, low self-worth bordering on self-hatred, self-repression, excessive anger and guilt, and focus on others to the abandonment of one's self. Incidentally, to give you an idea of how influential a voice Beattie's is, Codependent No More, originally published in 1986, had sold more than six million copies by the summer of 2001 and, according to Rice, enjoyed a 152-week stint on Publisher Weekly's bestseller list. Beattie's own site boasts that an average of 15,000 people per month are purchasing copies.

Rice believes (I think with good reason) that the train of thought espoused by Beattie and another noted advocate of codependency theory, John Bradshaw (whose seminars you may have caught on public television), is dependent upon the thinking of Abraham Maslow (whose influence on Christian thought I blogged about here) and Carl Rogers whom Rice refers to as "liberation psychotherapists." Maslow, Rogers, and the contemporary heralds of codependency theory share two foundational assumptions. The first is that human nature is intrinsically either benign or benevolent. The second is that psychological and relational problems are the products of repression of the true self by external, familial and/or societal forces. Since the true self is at least morally neutral and at best predisposed to kindness, then any corruption of the self must be the result of its having been stifled by others. Referring to Beattie's description of the codependent person, the tendency to be obsessed with controlling others' behavior is not due to any intrinsic moral flaw in human nature but is rather the consequence of repression of the authentic self. The remedy to such repression is the pursuit of autonomy, liberation from the constraints of norms, expectations, and moral judgments that come from external sources.

It always disturbed me to find that Beattie's book was carried by so many Christian booksellers since there is nothing Christian about her diagnosis of or prescribed remedy for the phenomena to which she attaches the label "codependency." There are some scattered references to the Bible and "God" in Codependent No More but by no means are the Scriptures functionally authoritative in Beattie's framing of the issues. On the two pages in which Jesus is mentioned, there is nothing said about his redemptive mission. Instead, he serves as a spokesman for codependence theory. Commenting on Jesus' response to Martha that her sister Mary had made a better decision by sitting and listening to him (Luke 10: 38-42), Beattie writes:

His message might be that Mary made the right choice because it's more important to enjoy people than it is to cook and clean. But I also believe there's a message here about taking responsibility for our own choices, doing what we want to be doing, and realizing how we become angry when we don't. Maybe Mary's choice was right because she acted as she wanted to. (Hazelden, 1986, pp. 92-93)

In her more recent work, Finding Your Way Home: A Soul Survival Kit, Beattie claims that she considers herself "a member of the Christian faith," but it's obvious that she does not regard the Bible as any more authoritative or divinely inspired than any other religious text. In a section in which she advises readers to feed their faith, she states that she is comforted by reading the Torah and the Koran "in addition to the Bible." Never mind the fact that Christians consider the Torah to be part of the Christian Scriptures. Beattie claims that the holy books are "powerful texts" and advises readers not to worry if they don't understand them with their conscious minds because:

These books are deeply encoded with messages that will activate time capsules of faith in our Super Consciousness. The holy books speak the language of the soul (HarperSanFrancisco, 1998, p. 193).

Earlier in the book, on the same page on which she approvingly cites The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, Beattie's religious relativism is undeniable:

Whether you subscribe to the tenets of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Bahai, Hinduism or any other religion, the common ingredient is faith. It is the unseen force that strings together this thing called life. It makes religion work. It makes life work. It opens the door to miracles" (p. 190)

Beattie's popularity is due, in part, to the fact that she addresses attitudes and behaviors that are virtually universal. Who can't find him or herself somewhere in her sweeping definition of a codependent? Which of us doesn't let the behavior of others affect us and which of us can honestly claim that we do not sometimes try to manipulate the people in our lives so as to have them respond to us in desirable ways? Beattie has astutely observed how sinners act but her view of human nature as intrinsically pristine leads to her being greatly mistaken about the why and consequently about the resolution. As Ed Welch notes in When People Are Big and God is Small:

She obviously hit on a topic that was important to many people, yet it was basically the fear of man in a secular garment. Melody Beattie talked about the problem in terms of being controlled by or dependent on other people, and her prescription was to love yourself more (P & R, 1997, p. 18).

Beattie's solution is a conglomerate of humanistic pop psychology and New Age mysticism. Nevertheless, she is frequently presented to the Christian community as a trustworthy guide to help them interpret and resolve their problems. Consider, for example, that four of her titles, including the two mentioned above, are sold by Christianbook.com (CBD) with three of them (at least at the time of this writing) listed as being on the top of their bestseller list.

Reviving Lust and Idolatry

A few weeks ago, on Justin Taylor's recommendation, I listened to a sermon by C. J. Mahaney on James 4:1-2 called "Cravings Underlie Conflicts" and I encourage you to do likewise. It was very timely as I'm team teaching an adult class at our church using a video series from Peacemaker Ministries on biblical principles for resolving relational conflict and that week the lesson, "Conflict Starts in the Heart," focused on the same passage.


Both Mahaney and Ken Sande (President of Peacemaker Ministries and author of The Peacemaker) discuss how our interpersonal struggles emanate from intense desires or lusts that captivate our hearts and become substitutes for God. Sande describes the process by which a desire, even for something which is good, can progress into an idol. Desire becomes demand. When those around me fail to meet those demands, I judge them and resolve to punish them in some way. This might be through overt anger or some more subtle expression of displeasure that we display until our demands are met.


Biblical counselors frequently employ the concept of idolatry to answer questions about what motivates us to act in certain ways but not all find this satisfying. Jim Beck, for example, professor of counseling at Denver Seminary, characterizes biblical counseling in the following manner in a paper he wrote on the importance of integrating psychology and theology:

It only appears, we are told, that the Bible does not address issues such as anorexia, paranoia, or panic attacks. If we dig deep enough into the teachings of Scripture we will uncover the true underlying causes of even the most recent of diagnostic categories. By “probing the unfathomed depth and breadth of Scripture”.... biblical counselors can find relevant material for every human struggle. They accomplish this feat in large part by reductionistic strategies that collapse most all psychogenic pathologies to some form of idolatry.

Beck insinuates that biblical counselors exaggerate the part idolatry plays in our behavior. Of course, it would be overly simplistic to boil all kinds of emotional, behavioral, and relational problems to idolatry. But Beck's comments make me wonder. If biblical counseling is charged with making too much of idolatry as an explanatory category, cannot the opposite charge be made against so much of what goes on in the name of Christian counseling? Why is such a recurrent biblical emphasis so glaringly absent from so much popular Christian literature about the nature of our problems?

In preparation for the class I'd be leading I turned to an article by David Powlison which I consider one of the most thorough treatments of the subject of lust that I've ever come across. (Incidentally, Mahaney cites Powlison as the "living guy" from whom he's learned the most about indwelling sin and progressive sanctification, John Owen being the "dead guy" who's taught him the most about those subjects.) I first came across it about ten years ago when it appeared as a chapter ("How Shall We Cure Troubled Souls") in The Coming Evangelical Crisis: Current Challenges to the Authority of Scripture and the Gospel, edited by John Armstrong. A more recent and somewhat revised version appears as Chapter 8 ("I Am Motivated When I Feel Desire") in Powlison's book Seeing With New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture.

Powlison notes that while "lusts of the flesh" (sometimes called cravings or pleasures) is a summary term for the divine diagnosis of what is most wrong with us, the understanding of "lust" held by most Christians is both narrow and shallow:

...the term "lust" has become almost useless to modern readers of the Bible. It is reduced to sexual desire. Take a poll of the people in your church, asking them the meaning of "lusts of the flesh." Sex will appear on every list. Greed, pride, gluttonous craving, or mammon worship might be added in the answers of a few of the more thoughtful believers. But the subtleties and details are washed out, and a crucial biblical term for explaining human life languishes. In contrast, the New Testament writers use this term as a comprehensive category for the human dilemma! It will pay us to think carefully about its manifold meanings. We need to expand the meaning of a term that has been truncated and drained of significance. We need to learn to understand life through these lenses, and to use these categories skillfully (Seeing With New Eyes, p. 148).

To support his claim concerning the centrality of "lust" to understanding motivation and bad behavior, Powlison offers a brief sampling of New Testament passages:

For example, 1 John 2:16 contrasts the love of the Father with "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life." (See also Rom. 13:14; Gal. 5:16-17; Eph. 2:2 [actually, v. 3]; 4:22; James 1:14-15; 4:1-3; 1 Peter 1:14; 2 Peter 1:4.) This does not mean that the New Testament is internalistic. In each of these passages, behavior intimately connects to motive, and motive to behavior. Wise counselors follow the model of Scripture and move back and forth between lusts of the flesh and the tangible works of the flesh, between faith and the tangible fruit of the Spirit (p. 148).

As I've noted before, I am persuaded that a major contributing factor to our unfamiliarity with the biblical language of lust is the fact that we have become more conversant in the language of need as taught by secular psychological theorists. Our self-understanding has been largely shaped by views depicting our essential problem as being emotionally and psychologically unfulfilled as opposed to being captives of our cravings. Sadly, some of the most effective tutors in the language of psychological needs are Christian authors.

Related: Justin Taylor's Five Lust Languages?

A Voice Crying Out in the Therapeutic Wilderness

Amidst the biological or sociological reductionism and denial of human depravity that characterize so much of the thinking coming from mental health professions, this essay by Dr. Richard Friedman in today's New York Times is a refreshing oddity. Swimming against the tide of searching for mental illness behind every conceivable instance of bad behavior, Dr. Friedman suggests that in many (if not most) cases, the cause is something that psychiatry can neither diagnose nor cure - meanness.

When have you ever heard of a therapist telling a patient that he is mean or bad? Probably never. It’s not fashionable in our therapy-friendly nation, where people who behave obnoxiously are assumed to have a treatable psychiatric problem until proven otherwise. Nothing in the human experience is beyond the power of psychiatry to diagnose or fix, it seems. But even for me, an optimist and a proponent of therapy, things have gotten a little out of hand.

Dr. Friedman later asks whether we must "turn everything we don’t like about our fellow humans into a form of psychopathology?" That's a very important question but I don't think the tendency to boil everything down to psychopathology is primarily motivated to explain away the misbehavior of our neighbor so much as it is to excuse and justify ourselves. Psychiatric and psychological theories easily become sophisticated tools which we employ to aid us in our suppression of the truth.

An Equal-Opportunity Disorder

The media are abuzz with the findings of a recent study indicating that men are almost as likely (5.5 percent of men) to be compulsive shoppers as women (6 percent of whom engage in the behavior).

The complete findings of the study appear in the current issue of a major national publication. No, not Cosmopolitan or GQ, as you might expect, but the American Journal of Psychiatry. If you're wondering why excessive spending is of interest to medical professionals, it's because, in yet another instance of the medicalizing of life (i.e., reducing all manner of life's problems to illness), the American Psychiatric Association claims that those who frequently experience irresistible and irrational urges to buy things suffer from a condition known as "compulsive buying (or shopping) disorder." According to one account of the study's findings, "Sufferers often rack up thousands of dollars in debt and lie to their loved ones about their purchases. The consequences can be bankruptcy, divorce, embezzlement and even suicide attempts." Researchers conclude that one in 20 adults in the U.S. "suffer" from the "condition."

What is not being as widely broadcast is the fact that this study was funded by an educational grant from Forest Pharmaceuticals Inc. (see small print at the end of the above linked article), whose speaker's bureau includes both the senior author (Lorrin Koran) and co-author (Elias Aboujaoude) of the compulsive shopping study. What makes this connection so interesting is the fact that three years ago another study, also funded by a grant from Forest Labs, reported that a commonly prescribed antidepressant called citalopram (which Forest Labs just happens to manufacture) might be useful in alleviating compulsive shopping disorder. It comes as no surprise that Lorrin Koran was this study's lead researcher as well.

Of course, the fact that those researching a drug's effectiveness are in the employ of the pharmaceutical company that manufactures it does not in itself discredit the research. However, it should at least raise suspicion about just how objective the research is. I've been doing a fair amount of reading lately about the marketing strategies of pharmaceutical companies and it's distressing, to say the least. In their book Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All into Patients, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels write:

Psychiatry's intimate relationship with the pharmaceutical industry has become notorious. When the former New England Journal of Medicine editor Dr. Marcia Angell published her famous editorial "Is Academic Medicine for Sale?," it was this group of specialists that she chose to illustrate her point. She wrote that when journal staff were searching for an experienced and independent psychiatrist to write a review article about antidepressants, they had a great difficulty finding one, because only "very few" in the entire United States were free of financial ties to the drug makers (25-26).

Now that it has been "established" that compulsive spending is not just a women's issue, as previously thought, the market for drugs promising to treat the condition has been expanded, much to the pharmaceutical companies' glee, not to mention the relief of those now liberated from any moral evaluation of their insatiable appetites in the name of medical science.

Academic Doping: Success at What Cost?

Albert Mohler comments on a disturbing MSNBC report that caught my eye as well. It addresses a growing trend called "academic doping." Some parents are pressuring their teens' physicians to prescribe powerful stimulants used in the treatment of ADD/ADHD in order to enhance their academic performance - even when there's no reason to diagnose the kids with the condition.

As Dr. Mohler notes, this phenomenon involves numerous interwoven issues:

Some parents may want to blame a child's lack of academic performance on a medical condition. Others see the academic race for scholarships and college entry to be adequate reason to seek a chemical enhancement for their own kids. Parents of high achievers must wonder, "If he's doing this well without Ritalin, what could he do with it?" In any event, the promise takes the form of a pill.

We might be tempted to hastily dismiss Old Testament accounts of parents sacrificing their offspring to idols as the misguided acts of backward and primitive people. But in light of stories like this, it's apparent that we just have more sophisticated, socially acceptable, and protracted ways of killing our children to satisfy our hearts' desires (even if the object of our desire is their success).

Dr. Mohler poses the following questions to Christian parents:

How do we define success and achievement? Just what are our expectations for our kids? Are we really ready to put them on powerful stimulants, just to raise their grades and test scores? What are we teaching our kids when we do this?

These are all crucial queries but there is a more foundational issue that we should at least be willing to consider. To what degree have we thought critically about the philosophical underpinnings of biological psychiatry's claims? Ironically, while we are on one hand vehemently opposed to the dehumanizing and anti-biblical naturalism of Darwinian evolution, we seem all too ready to eat from its tree when it takes the form of materialistic psychiatry.

Increasingly, members of its own ranks are saying that the emperor has no clothes. Peter Breggin, for example, a psychiatrist who has been very critical about the over-prescribing of psychiatric medication and the pharmaceutical companies' marketing of disease in order to market their products, has called modern biological psychiatry "a materialistic religion masquerading as a science." Like the public at large, we have been well catechized (by means of pharmaceutical commercials and word of mouth) in the dogmas of "mental health." We know for example, that depression is due to imbalanced brain chemistry despite the fact that this is a knowledge claim that even the drug companies do not make in the absence of scientific validation. We readily accept the myriad of diagnostic pronouncements based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as the authoritative declarations of "science" despite the fact that no medical tests exist for any of the close to 400 labels therein described.

Just yesterday I received in the mail a book that I only recently learned of though it has been in publication since 1999 - Unholy Madness: The Church's Surrender to Psychiatry. Its author, Dr. Seth Farber, was a practicing psychotherapist for 16 years after which time he left his profession because of what he considered irresolvable conflicts between Christian theology and what he calls the religion of psychiatry. I've only been able to read the introduction and portions of the conclusion (I couldn't resist skipping ahead) and I find myself in hearty agreement with most of what I've read, especially the following excerpt from the intro (Readers familiar with Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth and/or Francis Schaeffer's works will recognize the underlying two-tier view of truth):

The church's surrender to psychiatry has been facilitated by its tendency to subject human life to an artificial compartmentalization: private versus public, spiritual versus political, otherworldly versus worldly. For too long the church has claimed the private, the spiritual and the otherworldly as its proper domain while allowing secular authorities to dominate the public, the political and the worldly.

Since the rise of modern psychology/psychiatry there has been yet a new compartmentalization: the spiritual versus the psychological. But there are no "psychological" needs or capacities that are not spiritual. By accepting this spurious bifurcation of the spiritual into the (secular) psychological and the (nonsecular) spiritual, the church has severely compromised its authority and enabled the practitioners of the idolatrous religion of mental health to promulgate their faith system and thus to gain control over the hearts and minds (and pocketbooks) of millions of Americans. I have attempted throughout this book to demonstrate that the rationale for this usurpation of power by the mental health professions and for the abdication of responsibility by the church is specious: mental health professionals do not possess highly specialized "scientific expertise" enabling them to uniquely minister to individuals' "psychological" needs (12).

The question remains whether the constellation of symptoms called ADD/ADHD constitutes a medical disease for which any child should be given potent stimulants with potentially hazardous side effects.

Christians and the Psychiatric Culture

Last night I finished reading a book I mentioned here a few weeks ago, Will Medicine Stop the Pain?: Finding God’s Healing for Depression, Anxiety, and Other Troubling Emotions by Elyse Fitzpatrick and another biblical counselor, Laura Hendrickson, a physician who formerly practiced psychiatry. The book targets women since, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians, twice as many women as men will experience depression in their lifetime.Hendrickson not only prescribed antidepressants to her patients but for a period took them herself to treat diagnosed depression and bipolar disorder. She candidly relates her experiences with childhood rejection, subsequent emotional instability, and drug-induced confusion including suicidal and homicidal thoughts. Other first person accounts from Christian women who have struggled with depression appear throughout the book.

The authors explain how modern psychiatry frequently operates on the premise that human beings are reducible to our biochemical components. Intense emotional pain is therefore concluded to be the result of physical disease. They contrast this materialistic perspective with a biblical view of the person as consisting of the uniting of the outer man (the physical body including the brain) and the inner man which is referred to biblically by terms like the heart, mind, spirit, and/or soul. Fitzpatrick and Hendrickson acknowledge that the body can affect and influence the heart and vice versa. They also concede that there are real, empirically verifiable diseases of the brain (as well as brain injuries) that can have negative effects on one’s perception, cognition, and moods. However, they point out that there are no tests for so-called imbalances in brain chemistry for which antidepressants are said to be correctives. They also claim that emotional pain is intended to inform us what is going on in our hearts so that we might avail ourselves of the resources that are ours in Christ to experience heart transformation.

Fitzpatrick and Hendrickson take great pains to caution readers currently on antidepressants against deciding to go off them without medical supervision.  One of the medical professionals frequently cited is Joseph Glenmullen, a psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard Medical School and is also in private practice. I had seen him on ABC's Prime Time Live two years ago and had thought at the time of picking up one of his books but never got around to it. (Dr. Glenmullen's responses to Prime Time viewers' questions about antidepressant side effects and withdrawal are available here.) Glenmullen authored Prozac Backlash and more recently, The Antidepressant Solution which I’m in the midst of reading.

While he prescribes antidepressants on a limited basis, Glenmullen has been a very outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical companies' campaign to market them to physicians and the general public. He believes that the majority of Americans currently taking them are doing so unnecessarily. He is also very concerned that many physicians, who are often reliant upon the drug companies for their information about the drugs and their effects, are ignorant about antidepressant dependence, withdrawal, and how to safely taper patients off them. It’s frightening to learn how misleading pharmaceutical companies have been in their pushing of various medications, many times suppressing evidence of ineffectiveness and/or harmful side effects. According to Glenmullen, ample evidence exists indicating that in some people, antidepressants can create the very symptoms they were prescribed to treat. And in some cases, such a dependence is built that serious symptoms can result from forgetting to take the pills at their proper time. When this happens, patients often think that they are having a relapse when, in actuality, the drug is responsible for their problems.

I can't recommend the above books highly enough to those taking antidepressants (whether male or female) and those who care about someone who is. Readers may also be interested in acquiring a Mars Hill Audio Journal interview with David Healy, a British psychiatrist and author of The Antidpressant Era and more recently Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression on antidepressants and the concept of disease.

When one takes into consideration that the disorders the psychiatric community labels people with, are not scientifically validated, there is much cause for both alarm and caution. I’m especially concerned because I know numerous Christians who have bought the well-publicized line that taking antidepressants is analogous to taking insulin or other medication designed to treat biologically detectable illnesses. In a chapter on biological psychiatry in his book Seeing With New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture, David Powlison makes what I believe is an accurate observation:

The church typically lags a bit behind the culture's way of thinking. But the ethos and practice of biopsychiatry are deeply affecting the church already. If it's broken, or even just not working optimally, it can be fixed from the outside by a drug: better living through chemistry. In your ministry and in your church you are probably already facing the ethos and the practices. Many people in both pew and pulpit are on mind-, mood-, and behavior-altering drugs. We all increasingly face the ideas and knowledge claims, too. The cover story in Time magazine informs the everyday queries and choices of Christian people. Eventually such ideas make it into the educational system as the received wisdom of the culture with which to disciple the next generation (p. 243)

The more believers uncritically accept the therapeutic ethos that so permeates our culture, the less relevant and precious the gospel will seem.

Related Tags: depression, antidepressants, mental illness, psychiatry, Elyse Fitzpatrick, Laura Hendrickson, Joseph Glenmullen, David Powlison, David Healy, counseling, psychology, biblical counseling

Poli Psych

Glenn (Instapundit.com) and Dr. Helen Reynolds recently talked to Dr. Nicholas Cummings about the politicization of psychology (HT: Stones Cry Out). Here's their summary:

Is psychology over-politicized? We interview Dr. Nicholas Cummings, a past President of the American Psychological Association, and coauthor of Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm, about the injection of politics into mental health in general, and the American Psychological Association in particular. Plus, why men are disappearing from the psychological profession.
You can listen to the podcast directly (no iPod needed!) by clicking right here, or you can get it via iTunes right here.

I blogged about the book here and here. Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian has also written about how a liberal political ideology, rather than sound research, appears to be driving the APA's stance on abortion and homosexual marriage.

The APA's Social Vision

Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian points to the American Psychological Association's apparent dismissal of a recent study indicating that abortion has adverse effects on women's mental health and asks, "...is the APA a civil rights organization? Should civil rights trump their advocacy for mental health? What's really going on here politically, anyway?" 


This isn't the first time the self-professed scientific and professional community has opted for activism over research. Nicholas Cummings, a former APA president and co-editor of the book Destructive Trends in Mental Health, claims that the Association only conducts research "when they know what the outcome is going to be...only research with predictably favorable outcomes is permissible." In this article about the APA's stance toward homosexuality, Cummings describes an exchange he had with another member at a meeting convened to discuss the future of the organization:

I was just about to agree with one of the participants, when she stopped me before I could speak: 'I don't know what you are going to say, but there is nothing you and I can agree on, because you are a straight white male and I am a lesbian.'

He continues:

Such blatant reverse discrimination was overlooked by everyone else in the room, but I was dumbfounded. This woman is prominent in APA affairs, is extensively published, and has received most of the APA's highest awards. The APA continues to laud her, even though recently she had her license suspended for an improper dual relationship with a female patient! What would be the response had it been a straight white male in an improper dual relationship with a female patient?

A message from current APA President Gerald P. Koocher states in part: "Healthy, well-adjusted people build better societies, and improving societal institutions builds better people. Psychology has much to contribute, and we must do a better job of making these potential contributions self-evident." 


This appears to be a commendable goal but there are important questions we need to ask in response to assertions like this. What criteria will we use to evaluate health and well-adjustedness? What ideals should guide our attempts to improve society? Which conception of the good life should we follow? More important, which is true?


Psychological research may prove quite helpful in giving us insight into how we think and behave but it cannot tell us how we should be thinking and behaving. Even our interpretations of what we observe are dependent upon some pre-scientific beliefs about what it means to be human, whether or not there is a teleology or purpose for our existence, and what is ultimately real. 

When we take the time to reflect on these issues, the well-worn plea for neutrality in the public square is more clearly seen for what it is - nonsense. Someone's philosophy of life will dictate public policy. This means that Christians need not be ashamed or embarrassed for thinking "Christianly" (to use a phrase coined by Harry Blamires) about psychology or any other facet of life. To conform to the myth of neutrality is, in fact, to betray the faith.

Teens Teaching Teens to Cut, Starve, and Choke Themselves

The February 2006 issue of Reader's Digest has an article that youth workers and parents should read. It's about the rising number of American teens who practice various forms of self-injurious behavior such as cutting, anorexia, and nearly asphyxiating themselves to induce a drug-like high by cutting off oxygen to the brain. Though the article does not frame things theologically, it vividly illustrates the role that socialization plays in sin's outworking. According to one pediatrician quoted in the article, "These practices are spreading like wildfire because of the Internet."

Psychologists, pediatricians and youth counselors contend that under the radar, hundreds of websites and chat rooms are fueling an explosion of self-destructive practices considered in vogue by a surprising number of kids. They swap techniques about how to injure themselves -- and, like Joel and Caitlin, keep it all hidden from their parents.

"Clearly, the Internet is a major tool for good," says Ken Mueller, co-director of CPYU.org, an informational website about youth culture. "But as we're seeing now, it can also lead to great harm. Kids become addicted to these sites, and suddenly behaviors that used to be considered taboo are no longer hidden, which makes them seem more acceptable -- even cool."

If the statistics offered in this piece are credible, this is an issue that the church will be facing with greater frequency. One resource I'd recommend as an introduction to the subject from a theological perspective is a booklet authored by Ed Welch called Self-Injury: When Pain Feels Good. Welch explores the various things self-injurious behavior can be saying (e.g., "I am guilty. I must be punished," "I am angry," "I can't feel this way any longer; hurting myself is the only way to stop my feelings") and shows how all of them point to God and how the gospel offers real hope to those enslaved to these self-destructive patterns of living. Addressing the objection some might raise to the suggestion that self-abuse is at root a spiritual issue, Welch writes:

This seems like a harsh way to explain the possible inner workings of self-injury, but if we really believe that self-injurers share a bond with those who don't purposely injure themselves, we would expect self-injurers to have a lot of "self" motivating their behavior. We all do! Scripture consistently reminds us that our greatest problem, even more than Satan himself, is our selfish desires (James 4:1-3). Pride and self-interest tend to rule our hearts. Contrary to what we may think, self-love is never a biblical command. The command is that we love others to the degree that we love ourselves (Matt. 19:18).

I touched on the topic of self-love in a recent post which, if you missed, you can find here.

Common Sense Counseling?

The class I'm leading through Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth recently covered the chapters describing the philosophical ethos of 19th century America and how it contributed to Christians embracing the idea of neutral (that is, free from all religious or philosophical biases) knowledge. Common Sense Realism, which began with Thomas Reid in Scotland, came to the U.S. where it thrived in academic circles, including theological education. Reid's thinking was prompted by the British empiricist skeptic, David Hume. Pearcey says,

....[Reid] aimed his own philosophical efforts at refuting Hume and formulating a new foundation for knowledge. The way to avoid skepticism, Reid proposed, is to realize that some knowledge is "self-evident"-that is, it is forced upon us simply by the way human nature is constituted. As a result, no one really doubts or denies it. It is part of immediate, undeniable experience.

Pearcey further explains the extent to which Reid's thinking was influenced by that of Francis Bacon who maintained that scientific progress required jettisoning all metaphysical precommitments and allowing the facts to simply speak for themselves. Scientific systems can then be constructed by reasoning inductively on the basis of what has been observed. According to this view, complete objectivity is both desirable and possible. But, as Pearcey notes, this insistence that one liberate himself from all philosophical traditions and systems in order to acquire knowledge is itself a philosophy. Failure to recognize this, however, made Christians reluctant to allow their biblical convictions to inform their thinking in fields outside of theology.

One consequence of adopting this model of knowing is that apologetics is necessarily prior to the doing of theology though not a theological task itself. Its purpose is to justify Christianity's claims according to allegedly neutral standards of reasoning. Only upon successful completion of this task is the theologian permitted to proceed. Writing in the early 20th century, B. B. Warfield wrote:

It thus lies in the very nature of apologetics as the fundamental department of theology, conceived as the science of God, that it should find its task in establishing the existence of a God who is capable of being known by man and who has made Himself known, not only in nature but in revelations of His grace to lost sinners, documented in the Christian Scriptures. When apologetics has placed these great facts in our hands-God, religion, revelation, Christianity, the Bible-and not till then are we prepared to go on and explicate the knowledge of God thus brought to us, trace the history of its workings in the world, systematize it, and propagate it in the world ("Apologetics" in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge).

I was reminded of this quote yesterday when I read this post by Tom Gee in which he delves into a subject that is of great interest to me-the subtle yet powerful absorption of psychological conceptual schemes such that the church's ability to think theologically about life and its problems is seriously impaired. Tom challenges the widely held view that some people have been so wounded by the sins of others that they stand in need of professional counseling before the ministry of the Word and the Spirit can take root in their lives and effect change.

If there is one area that Christians have been slow to recognize the crucial role presuppositions play in the formulation of theories, it is that of counseling. The thought that some wounds of the psyche require the application of extra-biblical knowledge so that the Word of God may find fertile soil jogged my thinking. Is there any connection between Warfield's conviction that supposedly unbiased science must grant permission for systematic theology to proceed and the popular assumption that "scientific" psychological counseling must, at least in some cases, pave the way for practical theology?

Technorati Tags: theology, psychology, apologetics, counseling, philosophy, worldview, evangelicalism

The Third Great Commandment?

The notion that learning to love ourselves is a prerequisite to loving others is such a fixture in American Christian minds that questioning it might cause some to react as though one is calling into question a tenet of historic Christian orthodoxy. Nevertheless, I think it needs to be challenged. The idea was definitely more prominent during the reign of humanistic theories of counseling that emphasized self-actualization. Believers scurried to find biblical prooftexts to demonstrate to the world that secular psychologists were only now discovering what God had revealed millennia before. Foremost among these was what Jesus identified as the commandment secondary but related to the great commandment to love God with our whole selves. After citing Deuteronomy 6:5 as the answer to a lawyer's query as to which was the greatest of the Law's commandments, Matthew (22:39) and Mark (12:31) tell us that Jesus cited Leviticus 19:18 as the second most important imperative: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Regardless of the fact that Jesus said he was referring to only two commandments, some have sought to find within the second imperative an implicit third - love thyself. Disobeying this one will make loving others difficult if not impossible.

This raises questions in my mind. Can you think of anywhere that the Bible attributes the mistreating of others to the lack of love for oneself? If not, what answers do the Scriptures offer to explain inhumanity, indifference, and cruelty? We need to frequently ask questions like these to insure that we are faithfully reflecting the themes, emphases, and categories of Scripture rather than those of the therapeutic spirit of the age.

Jesus was not insinuating that unless one loves himself he is incapable of loving others. Rather, he knew that self-love is already present and potent within every human heart. But how can that be? I think a great deal of the confusion about this issue stems from the fact that each of us can identify things we don't like about ourselves; things we wish were other than they are. I have in mind things like character flaws, sinful patterns of life, physical imperfections, and deficits in various skills and abilities. We may think or even say at times, "I hate myself because I....." But does it necessarily follow from the fact that there are things about myself that I don't like, that mine is a problem of not loving myself enough? No.

To think through this, we have to first consider what it means to love another biblically. There are many places we could turn in search of an answer but for the sake of time and space I'm going to focus on Jesus' teaching about loving our enemies in Luke 6:27-36. From this passage we can conclude that love involves pursuing and promoting another's well-being; acting in such a manner as to secure what is good for him or her. If that definition of love is granted, it becomes much more evident that none of us is deficient in the area of self love. Even the fact that there are things that I don't like about myself is a manifestation of my love for myself. Those things bother me because I want better for....myself! Likewise, craving the love of others is not an indication that I do not love myself but a sign that I do. I am intent on pursuing whatever I think will enhance my pleasure. The universality of self love is what leads the apostle Paul to call husbands to love their wives as themselves (Ephesians 5:28). He reasons that since a man and woman have become one flesh, then a husband should love his spouse in the same way that he already loves himself. "For no one hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church" (Ephesians 5:29).

"But," someone says, "that may be the general rule but there are many exceptions. What of the countless individuals engaged in self-destructive habits? What are we to make of the unfortunate reports of those who practice various forms of self-mutilating behavior or others who starve themselves to the brink of death on account of a distorted perception of their own bodies? These people obviously hate their own flesh and they are certainly not caring for themselves. I may reluctantly grant that most of us are objects of our own love but these folks certainly aren't." Admittedly this line of thinking is initially compelling and has a great deal of emotional force behind it. Nonetheless, I think that if self-love is understood in the manner that I have described, we must conclude that even such grossly self-destructive behavior is not a manifestation of the lack of self-love but rather evidence of why we stand in need of being liberated from its power.

Paul's use of the words "flesh" in Eph. 5:29 and "bodies" in v. 28 are examples of synecdoche, a figure of speech where the part is used to refer to the whole. This is evident from v. 33: "However, let each one of you love his wife as himself..." Saying that a man loves his own body or that no one hated his own flesh is another way of saying that we are intent on pursuing what we believe will make for our happiness, contentment, security, etc. As Pascal noted in his Pensees, even the decision to end one's own life is motivated by this inclination:

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

By denying that we stand in need of learning how to love ourselves, I am not suggesting that what I have called self-love is inherently wrong in all its manifestations. My point is not to advocate self-contempt. Perhaps no contemporary Christian author has done more to illustrate that the motivation to maximize our enjoyment is a good part of creation. Therefore, it is not to be rejected. However, as it did the rest of creation, humanity's revolt against our Creator perverted that self-love such that we are its slaves. God the Father sent forth God the Son to liberate us from that captivity and by the sanctifying work of His Spirit that liberty is being progressively worked out such that we are freer to be what we were made to be - lovers of God and each other.

Destructive Trends in Mental Health

This extensive review of the new book Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm persuaded me to add it to my ever-growing "to read" list. The volume is edited by Rogers H. Wright and Nicolas A. Cummings who have served in leadership capacities within the American Psychological Association (APA) and who refer to themselves as "lifelong liberal activists." That self-description makes them unlikely candidates for editing this volume which sounds an alarm about how political correctness and other elements of ultra-liberal ideology exercise influence over the APA at the expense of scientific research and the welfare of patients. Here are a few interesting excerpts from the review:

The editors of this volume provide compelling arguments for many destructive trends in the mental health professions - most particularly, psychology, but also psychiatry and social work. They demonstrate from an insider's perspective how activism masquerades as science in the APA, and how "diversity" has been redefined into a kind of narrow politicism, where differing worldviews are not only summarily dismissed, but the holders of such views actually punished.
Wright says there are many treatments advocated by psychology with little or no evidence of efficacy - for example, grief and trauma counseling, treatment of repressed memories regarding sexual abuse, as well as the extensive use (or abuse) of medications for questionable diagnoses of depression and ADD/ADHD.

The authors note that there is no empirical data on political correctness because it is "politically incorrect to question political correctness" (p. 22). They post two questions regarding political correctness, and offer a number of hypotheses for potential testing. The questions are: "What psychological functions does political correctness fulfill for the individual?" and "What is the attraction of political correctness to certain personalities?" The hypotheses offered to understand these behavioral phenomena include:

• Political Correctness Harbors Hostility
• Political Correctness Reflects Narcissism
• Political Correctness Masks Histrionics
• Political Correctness Functions as Instant Morality
• Political Correctness Wields Power
• Political Correctness Serves as Distraction
• Political Correctness Involves Intimidation
• Political Correctness Lacks Alternatives

A chapter devoted to children called "The Diseasing of America's Children" addresses the myth that childhood behavior disorders are caused by genes, noting that there is no good scientific evidence. Rosemond concludes, "The perpetrators of the disease model of behavior disorders engage in disingenuous misleading arguments" (p.223). He notes that psychologists have confused biological conditions with developmental ones, citing the DSM [Diagnostic & Statistical Manual] criteria for a pathological antisocial condition which he says "perfectly describes the terrible twos!" (p. 226).

This new book provides a window into the American Psychological Association and into psychology in [a] way hithertofore only suspected. The courage demonstrated by Wright and Cummings is unparalleled. Their professional and scientific accomplishments and their positions of prominence in the American Psychological Association, along with their reasoned, evidence-based arguments, make their work essentially unassailable. Though the authors of the various chapters are critical in their judgments, their judgments are supported by evidence and their informed opinions.

Survey on Integrating Religious Faith and Counseling

I received an email yesterday from Gregory K. Popcak, founder and director of Pastoral Solutions Institute, a counseling ministry devoted to helping Catholics with personal, marital, and family problems through the integration of their faith and "cutting-edge psychology." Mr. Popcak wrote:

....your site was recommended to me by a reader. The organization I direct is conducting a major study examining Christian (Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox) attitudes toward the integration of religious faith and counseling. The study does not assume that respondents have ever been or ever will be in counseling. We are just interested in readers' opinions. These opinions would help church leaders make decisions about meeting the needs of souls in their care.

He proceeded to ask if I would be willing to post a link to the survey with the following announcement:

You are invited to participate in an online study examining Christian attitudes toward integrating religious faith and counseling. The study is completely anonymous. The study does not assume that you have been or ever will be in counseling. The study is only interested in your opinions. It is hoped that this study will help Church leaders make decisions about the best way to provide assistance to the souls in their care. Your participation would make a valuable contribution to this goal.

To qualify for this study, you must be 18 years or older. All information will be kept completely confidential and anonymous. To learn more about the survey, or to participate, please click this link.

Obviously, I agreed to Mr. Popcak's request but that should not be interpreted as an endorsement of his theology or methods. If you've been a reader of this blog for any length of time, you know that the relationship between counseling psychology and the Christian faith is of great interest to me. I'm of the opinion that at least within American evangelicalism, psychotherapeutic concepts and categories have so captivated believers' minds that in many respects we are incapable of thinking biblically and theologically about ourselves and our problems. The acceptance of psychotherapeutic and pop-psychological diagnoses leads to the conclusion that the Bible is largely irrelevant to what ails us. Instead of such uncritical acceptance, what's needed is serious thinking about how biblical themes and concepts might offer alternative interpretations of and explanations for the same symptoms secular counseling theories have diagnosed according to their philosophies of life.

Yesterday I also read an article Robert C. Roberts contributed to the Winter 2003 volume of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology called "Psychotherapy and Christian Ministry" in which he writes:

Whether or not people are actually in therapy, they do learn from therapies to construe themselves as needing higher self-esteem before they can move on to more functional behavior, or as being the seat of certain defense mechanisms, or as having been put out of touch with their perfectly reliable internal valuing process by too much social pressure to conform, or as being victims of inadequate parenting in early life. If we prefer to spread the spiritual influence of Christian reflection rather than an alien framework like the psychology of the inner child or the ideology of codependency, then we have a positive reason for sticking with the psychology of the Christian tradition. As Christian ministers, we want to couch our psychological help as much as possible in the edifying language of the Christian message.

I agree. That said, I took the Pastoral Solutions Institute survey this morning and ask you to consider assisting Mr. Popcak in his research. It will be interesting to see the results.

Sowing Abraham's Seed (Part 3): Maslow & Marriage

In the initial post in this series I said that many popular Christian authors, particularly those who write on the subject of marriage, presuppose a view of personality and motivation bearing a strong resemblance to that of Abraham Maslow's. I also claimed that Maslow's thinking has so saturated American culture that it often serves as the silent and invisible framework through which we read the Bible and understand ourselves as Christians. Instead of helping believers cultivate sorely needed discernment by critically assessing Maslow's philosophy of life from the perspective of a biblical worldview, many Christian authors assume his diagnosis of what ails us and then force Scripture to conform to it. The gospel, if it is mentioned at all, is then offered as the solution to a problem that someone other than Jesus has defined while the problem that from God's perspective is most critical is viewed as being of little practical value to the issues with which we struggle. 


In this and following posts I wish to illustrate the phenomenon, citing examples from popular Christian books on marriage. Before I proceed, however, I want to plainly state that my criticisms are not intended in any way to call into question the faith of any of the authors I'll mention. I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of their commitment to Christ or to the institution of marriage. I think all of them are devoted to doing all they can to aid couples in strengthening and protecting their marriages and for this I am grateful. Unquestionably, zeal for marriage is a good thing. Zeal not tempered with biblical truth, is not.


Traces of Abraham's seed can be detected in a book recently recommended to me - For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men by Shaunti Feldhahn. As the title indicates, the book is intended to help women better understand the men in their lives. But this is not an end in itself but a means to a greater end. Feldhahn tells her readers, "The more we understand the men in our lives, the better we can support and love them in the way they need to be loved. In other words, this revelation is supposed to change and improve us" (emphasis in the original, p. 20). The book is based on the results of a survey of hundreds of men who were asked about their desires, fears, aspirations, dislikes, etc. I've heard from a few women that it has been an eye-opener for them and from my own reading I can understand why. On more than a few pages, I recognized myself in the descriptions of men's inner lives. Despite the following criticism, I think this small volume has much merit and can be instrumental in fostering greater understanding.


The reservation I have about the book, however, is that the author concludes from the fact that many men deeply desire the respect of their wives that this desire constitutes a need; a need that if unfulfilled, results in undesirable behavior. According to Feldhahn, "A man deeply needs the woman in his life to respect his knowledge, opinions, and decisions - what I would call his judgment" (p. 29). This male "need" for respect and affirmation is "so hardwired and so critical that most men would rather feel unloved than disrespected or inadequate" (p. 22). From her use of the word "hardwired" I take Feldhahn to mean that this need is a given of creation in which case we cannot but conclude that it is good.

As far as I can tell, Feldhahn nowhere considers the possibility that the desire to be esteemed may at times be so domineering that it is perceived as a need when in actuality it is better described by the biblical concept of lust or ruling desire. Is it not possible to want a good thing so much such that I experience frustration, discomfort, and anger if I can't have it? It shouldn't take much reflection on any of our parts to think of a time when that was so for us. Another question. Does the fact that I act badly when I don't get what I want prove beyond question that I need what I long for? Amnon, desirous of his beautiful half-sister, Tamar, "was so tormented that he made himself ill" (2 Samuel 13:2). But would anyone conclude from his adverse reaction that his craving for Tamar constituted an actual need?

The answer to that question is obvious, of course. Amnon was driven by sexual lust, something clearly proscribed by Scripture. But what of good desires -- wanting my wife to respect me? Is it really possible to lust after something with which God is pleased? I don't know of a better treatment of the New Testament concept of lust than that offered by David Powlison in a book titled The Coming Evangelical Crisis: Current Challenges to the Authority of Scripture and the Gospel (Moody, 1996). In a chapter called "How Shall We Cure Troubled Souls?" Powlison states that we have drastically thinned the New Testament's thick teaching about lust so much so that:

...."lust" has become almost useless to modern readers of the Bible. It is reduced to sexual desire. Take a poll of the people in your church, asking them the meaning of "lusts of the flesh." You will find that sex appears on every list. Greed, pride, or gluttonous craving might appear in the answers of a few of the more thoughtful believers. The marquee sins of the heart appear, but the subtleties and details are washed out. And a crucial biblical term for explaining human life languishes (p. 211).

In response to the question of what makes a desire sinful, Powlison writes:

This question becomes particularly perplexing to people when the object of their desire is a good thing. Notice some of the adjectives that get appended to our cravings: evil, polluted lusts (Col. 3:5; 2 Peter 2:10). Sometimes the object of desire itself is evil: e.g., to kill someone, to steal, to control the cocaine trade on the Eastern seaboard. But often the object of desire is good, and the evil lies in the lordship of the desire. Our will replaces God's as that which determines how we live. John Calvin put it this way: "We teach that all human desires are evil, and charge them with sin -- not in that they are natural, but because they are inordinate." In other words, the evil in our desires often lies not in what we want [e.g., respect from my wife] but that we want it too much. Natural affections (for any good thing) become inordinate, ruling cravings. We are meant to be ruled by godly passions and desires. Natural desires for good things are meant to exist subordinate to our desire to please the Giver of gifts. The fact that the evil lies in the ruling status of the desire, not the object, is frequently a turning point in counseling (p. 212).

Isn't it odd that such a prevalent biblical theme as lust or sinful desire plays only a supporting role (if it gets any stage time at all) in some of the most popular Christian books while the concept of emotional needs (which at least at first glance don't seem to be prominent in the Bible) gets top billing? Like other authors on the topic, Feldhahn seeks to ground biblical support for the "women need love and men need respect" model in Ephesians 5:33: "However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband." But this doesn't seem to me to be what the verse, considered in its context, is getting at. I suspect that this commonly held interpretation of the verse is due to our adopting Maslow's hermeneutic for interpreting people.

Next, drawing from Feldhahn and others, I want to discuss the implications of this view for our understanding of the nature and cause of sinful behavior. 

Oh, in case anyone's wondering, I haven't overlooked the question someone asked in response to Part 2. It's an important one that I intend to address in a future post. Your patience is greatly appreciated.

Sowing Abraham's Seed (Part 2)

In the first in this series of posts I offered a brief sketch of Abraham Maslow's theory of human nature and motivation. Maslow's assumption of the inherent goodness of human nature led him to trace the source of what, from a Christian perspective, would be called evil or sinful behavior, to unsatisfied psychological needs. Evil is, therefore, a response to psychological malnutrition. Quoting again from the second edition of Toward a Psychology of Being:

"Evil" behavior has mostly referred to unwarranted hostility, cruelty, destructiveness, "mean" aggressiveness. This we do not know enough about. To the degree that this quality of hostility is instinctoid, mankind has one kind of future. To the degree that it is reactive (a response to bad treatment), mankind has a very different kind of future. My opinion is that the weight of the evidence so far indicates that indiscriminately destructive hostility is reactive, because uncovering therapy reduces it, and changes its quality into "healthy" self-affirmation, forcefulness, selective hostility, self-defense, righteous indignation, etc.

Contrary to the Bible, which attributes the corruption that is in the world to sinful desire (2 Peter 1:4), Maslow contended that cruelty and inhumanity owe their existence to deficiencies of love, acceptance, security, and respect. According to Maslow, deprivation, not depravity, is humankind's root problem. Stated that way, it's apparent how opposed his anthropology is to that of Scritpure. Nevertheless, as I said in my previous post, a lot of Christian counseling, teaching, and writing bears more than a vague resemblance to the humanist psychologist's model. Today I'll cite one example.

A recent World Magazine article called "The Secret Sin," focused on infidelity among Christian women. The article reported George Ohlschlager, director of policy and public affairs with the Association of Christian Counselors as saying that such affairs stem from numerous issues including marital or childhood emotional deficits and in some cases, a lack of spiritual maturity. According to Ohlschlager, many Christian women, "are not practicing spiritual disciplines, and are not really pursuing an intimacy with Christ that would go a long way toward filling up some of those emotional needs."

Notice the crucial role the concept of deficiency needs plays in this interpretation. Marital infidelity is not primarily the outward expression of powerful, misguided desires or lusts. It is, rather, a response to "emotional deficits." What is most fundamentally responsible for the sinful behavior is an inadequate meeting of psychological requirements. A major problem with this kind of diagnosis is that it is operating with concepts and categories at odds with those of Scripture. Does the Bible ever account for sinful acts in terms of unsatisfied needs? Jesus identifies adultery as one of the various forms of evil that spring from the heart (Mark 7: 21-23) and doesn't even remotely suggest that this is due to some psychic lack. Sexual immorality is a manifestation of the desires of the flesh that war against the desires of the Spirit (Gal. 5:17-21). Maslow pictures the heart as a fragile plant in need of nourishment. I think the Bible pictures my heart more like the insatiable, carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors, demanding that it be fed and growing hungrier with every meal. If I commit adultery, or any other sin, the Bible doesn't lead me to ask what needs have gone or are going unmet. Instead, it shines its probing light upon my heart and asks, "What is it that you love, trust in, hope for, desire, or crave more than your Creator and Redeemer?"

Take note, too, of how when unmet emotional needs take center stage in our thinking about what motivates us, it transforms how we understand the purpose of spiritual disciplines, not to mention how we conceive of Christ's role in our lives. Without question, Jesus' followers should devote themselves to prayer and meditation on the Word in order to know Christ better. But is this really to "fill up" emotional needs? This is, in my estimation, a superimposition of an alien anthropology over the inspired texts. The beautiful, costly antique furniture of Scripture has been rearranged and pushed to the periphery to make room for a modern piece that doesn't match the decor.

Despite the pervasive assumption that destructive behavior is caused by unmet psychological needs, relatively few Christians consider what a need is and how it differs from an overwhelming want or what the Bible calls lust. Unfortunately, not many Christian self-help books raise those questions or help readers answer them. This is especially so with volumes on marriage. That will be the topic of my next post in this series.

In the meantime I urge you to read an in-depth article by Edward T. Welch called "Who Are We?: Needs, Longings, and the Image of God in Man." Welch surveys the history of need-based theory and critiques its adoption by Christian counseling.

Sowing Abraham's Seed

Humanist psychologist, Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was very optimistic about human nature, writing in his Toward a Psychology of Being: "This inner nature, as much as we know of it so far, seems not to be intrinsically or primarily evil." On the contrary, human nature is "good or neutral rather than bad." In the introduction to the same volume, Maslow wrote: Destructiveness, sadism, cruelty, malice, etc., seem so far to be not intrinsic but rather they seem to be violent reactions against frustration of our intrinsic needs, emotions, and capacities." In response to the question of the origin of neuroses, Maslow wrote:

My answer...was, in brief, that neurosis seemed at its core, and in its beginning, to be a deficiency disease: that it was born out of being deprived of certain satisfactions which I called needs in the same sense that water and amino acids and calcium are needs, namely that their absence produces illness. Most neuroses involved, along with other complex determinants, ungratified wishes for safety, for belongingness and identification, for close love relationships and for respect and prestige.

Basic needs, said Maslow, possess the following characteristics:

1. The deprived person yearns for their gratification persistently.
2. Their deprivation makes the person sicken and wither.
3. Gratifying them is therapeutic, curing the deficiency-illness.
4. Steady supplies forestall these illnesses.
5. Healthy (gratified) people do not demonstrate these deficiencies

Maslow described these "deficits" or "deficiency needs" as: "...empty holes, so to speak, which must be filled up for health's sake, and furthermore, must be filled from without by human beings other than the subject." Elsewhere he says that these psychological needs "may be considered as deficiencies which must be optimally fulfilled by the environment in order to avoid sickness and subjective ill-being." It is as important that psychological needs be met as it is that physiological needs (e.g., the need for salt, calcium, or vitamin D) be satisfied.

Maslow grouped needs into five levels that stood in a hierarchical and developmental relationship to each other. Beginning with the foundational level they are: physiological needs (e.g., food, drink, air, etc.), safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs (respect from others and for oneself), and the need for self-actualization (the ability to make the most of one's potential). Maslow proposed that we are most immediately aware of lower level needs but once they are satisfied, upper level needs become more apparent and have greater motivational force.

In that Maslow was seeking to construct a humanistic model of personality and motivation, it's no surprise that the concept of "sin" is absent from his system. Sommers and Satel write in One Nation Under Therapy:

From the beginning, Maslow's aim was to displace moral philosophy and religion with a science of man. Traditional religion, in his judgment, had proved inadequate. He proposed a "religion-surrogate." He said, "Throughout history [humanity] has looked for guiding values, for principles of right and wrong outside of [itself], to a God, to some sort of sacred book, perhaps, or to a ruling class." Maslow believed that he had found the basis for ethics and personal fulfillment in human nature itself.

Behavior and attitudes that are, from a biblical perspective, sinful, are not, according to Maslow, evidence of a morally corrupt nature but of frustrated needs. Assuming Maslow's diagnosis, the appropriate cure is not a new heart with redirected desires but satisfaction of the natural heart's yearnings. Neither the objects nor the intensity of our desires are the cause of the conflicts among us. Nancy Pearcey notes in Total Truth that "Every worldview...offers a counterpart to the Fall, an explanation of the source of evil and suffering. What has gone wrong with the world? Why is there warfare and conflict?" For Maslow, unfulfilled psychological needs are what bar us from Paradise.
 
This assumption about human motivation is deeply entrenched in the American psyche even among those unfamiliar with Maslow's work. What I find so astonishing (not to mention disturbing) is how influential and pervasive this perspective on human nature and behavior is among Bible-believing Christians. You don't have to search hard for it. It's propagated in sermons and popular Christian books, particularly those having to do with marriage. It's the lens through which we view life and even the grid through which we interpret Scripture.
Maslow was well aware that his motivational model was part of a larger worldview. In the preface to the second edition of Toward a Psychology of Being he described Humanist Psychology as "one facet of a general Weltanschauung, a new philosophy of life, a new conception of man...." Why, then, do Christians so readily accept and even defend this way of thinking about the human condition? Why does so much Christian teaching about why we do the things we do sound more like Abraham Maslow than Jesus, the seed of Abraham, the patriarch? I share the curiosity David Powlison expresses in his essay in Care for the Soul: Exploring the Intersection of Psychology and Theology:

Why does one or another secular theory of human motivation almost inevitably control the Christian counseling theory at the punch line, where counseling engages the details of life as it is lived? In particular, why have "need" theories that define significance, love and self-esteem as the standard needs been so prominent when they are so alien to the gaze of God and the psychological experience of Jesus? Why has the most typical, and apparently the most vital, external contribution of psychology been secular motivation theory, the very thing that wrenches human life out of its true context and drains psychological experience of its essential characteristics? Why do integrationist theories fail to take seriously the specific, omnipresent nature of sin as the chief and most immediate problem in the hearts of those we counsel?

I'll devote future posts to further exploration of the influence of Abraham Maslow on the children of Abraham, including examples of this influence in Christian literature. Go to Part 2