Idols of the Heart and "Vanity Fair"

At last, David Powlison's masterful article, Idols of the Heart and "Vanity Fair" (PDF), is online! This is one of his works to which I frequently return and which I've long wished was available on the net so others could readily access it. It's a profound, practical look at the relevance of the recurring biblical theme of idolatry for understanding motivation. Here's Powlison's introduction:

One of the great questions facing Christians in the social sciences and helping professions is this one: How do we legitimately and meaningfully connect the conceptual stock of the Bible and Christian tradition with the technical terminologies and observational riches of the behavioral sciences? Within this perennial question, two particular sub-questions have long intrigued and perplexed me.

One sort of question is a Bible relevancy question. Why is idolatry so important in the Bible? Idolatry is by far the most frequently discussed problem in the Scriptures. So what? Is the problem of idolatry even relevant today, except on certain mission fields where worshipers still bow to images?

The second kind of question is a counseling question, a “psychology” question. How do we make sense of the myriad significant factors that shape and determine human behavior? In particular, can we ever make satisfying sense of the fact that people are simultaneously inner-directed and socially-shaped?

Reading this article will help you understand why C. J. Mahaney credits Powlison with being the "living guy" from whom he's learned the most about sanctification and Elyse Fitzpatrick, in Idols of the Heart, thanks him for reconfiguring her thinking about idolatry. (HT: Monergism.com)

Sin's Disturbance of our Knowledge of Ourselves

This observation from Emil Brunner is relevant to the previous post:

The nearer anything lies to that center of existence where we are concerned with the whole, that is, with man's relation to God and the being of the person, the greater is the disturbance of rational knowledge by sin; the farther away anything lies from this center, the less is the disturbance felt, and the less difference is there between knowing as a believer or as an unbeliever. Revelation and Reason (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster, 1946), 383.

When Sinners Say "I Do"

Since learning of it I've been eager to read Dave Harvey's new book. The title hooked me and it's endorsed by men I admire and trust. Reading this interview with the author yesterday only heightened my anticipation. Here's Harvey's response to the question of why he's adding to the plethora of marriage books already on the market:

Though I’m grateful for some of these books, it’s common for marriage books to address the symptoms of marital challenges while neglecting the real problem. In this book, I say, “The cause of our marriage battles is neither our marriage nor our spouse. It’s the sin in our hearts—entirely, totally, exclusively, without exception. This is taught clearly and consistently in Scripture, from the first sin to the final judgment.” But don’t get me wrong—this book doesn’t merely bemoan the problem but exalts in the solution—the gospel! When Sinners Say “I Do”: Discovering the Power of the Gospel for Marriage avoids the psychological discussions that fill the pages of many popular needs-based resources. Instead, it encourages readers to develop the tools to diagnose their hearts and then flee to the gospel for help. The most helpful summary I think I can offer is taken right from the book: “God wants Christians to delight in marriage. And He has made provision in the gospel to do so. But we can’t truly understand the gospel, or even the basic problems of every marriage, until we come to terms with the undeniable reality of sin. Men and women (and me!) find real hope and help when we realize that God uses marriage to reveal the heart and change the soul.”

You can view the book's table of contents, foreword by Paul David Tripp, and preface here.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Dave Harvey, marriage, gospel

Why the Gospel Often Seems Irrelevant (to Christians)

Yesterday, as I've done so frequently in the past, I reflected on my deep appreciation and gratitude for the Journal of Biblical Counseling and those responsible for producing it. In some ways, the title is misleading because it could give the impression that only those engaged in formal counseling ministry can benefit from it. To be sure, it's a valuable resource for pastors, so much so that I think it should be a staple in every minister's reading. However, every issue contains thoughtful, theologically-rich content that can aid any follower of Christ in his or her pursuit of spiritual maturity.

A conversation with a frazzled parent seeking help in how to deal with a child's explosive tantrums led me to read an article by Michael Emlet and David Powlison called "Helping the Parents of an Angry Child" (Winter 2007, Volume 25, Number 1). As is so often the case when I read JBC articles, I not only received guidance for helping others but was confronted about issues in my own heart and life. The following paragraph, especially the last sentence, stood out to me because it addresses something that I think about frequently:

A child needs to learn how her anger operates directly against God. Too often parents only focus on the horizontal aspect of their child's sinful behavior - what the child has done to them. Targeting the heart means helping the child understand that her attitude, words, and actions violate God's standards first and foremost. To be self-willed is to assault God's right to rule. This God-ward focus keeps the gospel front and center, because sin against God and others has a remedy. If we confess our sins honestly, He is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us (1 John 1:9). Opening up the vertical dimension presents the immediate relevance of the gospel.

When considering my own reactions to life's problems and from conversations with other believers, I often wonder why it is that the gospel seems so disconnected and unrelated to the here and now. When we're dealing with the complexities and difficulties that are bound to arise, I think our (usually) unspoken mindset is "Yeah, I'm a Christian and I believe all that Bible stuff but I'm talking about real life here." That attitude betrays an underlying assumption that the gospel is largely impractical in terms of its explanatory and transforming power as far as our everyday struggles are concerned. As Paul Tripp and Tim Lane note in their book How People Change, believers often live with a gap between the two "thens" of the gospel:

The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is a "then-now-then" gospel. First, there is the "then" of the past. When I embrace Christ by faith, my sins are completely forgiven, and I stand before God as righteous. There is also the "then" of the future, the promise of eternity with the Lord, free of sin and struggle. The church has done fairly well explaining these two "thens" of the gospel, but it has tended to understate or misunderstand the "now" benefits of the work of Christ. What difference does the gospel make in the here and now? How does it help me as a father, a husband, a worker, and a member of the body of Christ? How does it help me respond to difficulty and make decisions? How does it give me meaning, purpose, and identity? How does it motivate my ministry to others?

Emlet and Powlison have identified one of the primary reasons that the gospel is functionally distanced from our daily lives - to the extent that I fail to see misguided worship as my greatest problem and adopt alien anthropologies offering alternative visions of what it means to be human, to that extent the gospel's luster appears dull and its melody sounds flat to my ears.

Interview with Elyse Fitzpatrick

Lydia Brownback asks author and biblical counselor Elyse Fitzpatrick about women, sin and sanctification, and two of her books - Idols of the Heart and Because He Loves Me: How God's Love Transforms Our Identity and Life (part 1 | part 2). (HT: Justin Taylor)

Biblical Counseling Resources

I recently described an article by David Powlison as one of the most thorough treatments on the subject of lust that I've ever read. With P&R's permission, Justin Taylor is posting excerpts from a revision of that article as it appears in Seeing With New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture. Here's what he's posted so far: Introduction, Question 1, Question 2, Question 3, Question 4. Do yourself a favor by reading these and forthcoming excerpts.

Tim Lane, coauthor with Paul Tripp of How People Change and Relationships: A Mess Worth Making, has been appointed as CCEF's Executive Director.

Tom Brown reflects on the church's role in the counseling process:

In the contemporary world we have all become familiar with the notion of the support group. The local church is God’s ultimate support group. But unlike the contemporary model that orders its support around habitual sin like alcoholism, gambling or gluttony, the New Testament orders its support in Jesus Christ as Lord among the visible community of forgiven sinners. The ministry aim of this community is not just to deal with the symptoms of sin but to go to the heart of the matter and deal with sin at its root. This happens when the church can competently say with Paul, “We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, that we may present every man complete in Christ” (Colossians 1:28).

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.

Awfully Good

"God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger--according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way."     - C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

John Stott Praying for Apologists

Jeff Clinton's posting the following quote from John Stott's Your Mind Matters prompted me to take the thin volume from my shelf and thumb through it once more. As Jeff points out, though over 30 years old, Stott's petition is as timely today as when originally penned. I wonder, then, why we don't hear it uttered more frequently in our churches. The kind of laborers Stott prays for are not the kind that usually come to mind when we ask the Lord to send workers into his harvest :

I pray earnestly that God will raise up today a new generation of Christian apologists or Christian communicators, who will combine an absolute loyalty to the biblical gospel and an unwavering confidence in the power of the Spirit with a deep and sensitive understanding of the contemporary alternatives to the gospel; who will relate the one to the other with freshness, pungency, authority and relevance; and who will use their minds to reach other minds for Christ (52).

I was surprised to see that my copy of the book is clean, free from any underlining or marginal scribbles. That probably means that I first read it prior to getting into the habit of marking books up as I read them or I just thought it was all so good that I would have marked everything! Here's another of Stott's many noteworthy thoughts concerning why the fact that human reasoning is fallen is no excuse for failing to engage people intellectually in our evangelism:

It is quite true that man's mind has shared in the devastating results of the Fall. The "total depravity" of man means that every constituent part of his humanness has been to some degree corrupted, including his mind, which Scripture describes as "darkened." Indeed, the more men suppress the truth of God which they know, the more "futile," even "senseless," they become in their thinking. They may claim to be wise, but they are fools. Their mind is "the mind of the flesh," the mentality of a fallen creature, and it is basically hostile to God and his law.

All this is true. But the fact that man's mind is fallen is no excuse for a retreat from thought into emotion, for the emotional side of man's nature is equally fallen. Indeed, sin has more dangerous effects on our faculty of feeling than on our faculty of thinking, because our opinions are more easily checked and regulated by revealed truth than our experiences (16).

My Conscience, My Publicist

With reference to the Gentiles who, unlike the Jews, were not afforded the privilege of God's written revelation, the apostle Paul states that they are nevertheless culpable for their sin because "They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them (Romans 2:15)." The conscience at times wears the hat of the prosecution, at others, that of the defense attorney. Or, to draw from the world of entertainment, the conscience at times serves as a publicist whose duty it is to present his client in the best possible light (though in this case the public is oneself).

I'm continually stunned by the readiness with which I am willing to take credit for what is noble and to come to my own defense for what is not. I thought about that today when I read the statement comedian Robin Williams offered the media to explain why he is again in rehab for alcoholism after twenty years of sobriety. According to Mara Buxbaum, Williams "found himself drinking again" and "has decided to take proactive measures to deal with this for his own wellbeing and the wellbeing of his family." So worded, Williams is portrayed as a hapless victim with respect to his excessive drinking and a responsible agent with regard to his rehabilitation. Why do we never hear of people voluntarily overindulging themselves and finding themselves in rehab?

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

Naming Problems "Sin"

"When we think of naming problems 'sin,' we tend to react in one of two ways. One reaction is to punish sin. We become moralistic and condemning, morbidly curious about others' failings, morbidly depressed about our own failings. When we assume a punitive stance toward sin and assume that others do the same, then calling something 'sin' necessarily involves condemnation of self or others. We all know, however, both by Scripture and instinct, that those who would help others need to love them, and that those who would find help need to know love. In the interest, then, of bringing sweet necessities - grace, kindness, gentleness, patience, acceptance, tender solicitude and sympathetic understanding - we must come up with categories other than sin. The unexamined and ultimately bizarre logic of this reaction is that we assume that we can be Christlike toward others and ourselves only if we define a problem as something other than sin - as a psychological problem, a mental illness or an addiction.

People who would understand a problem as sin must presumably be punitive. But how curious it is that Jesus, whose gaze was utterly conditioned by the sin analytic, brought grace and kindness! In fact, to be conscious that sin is the problem is the only way to experience grace for oneself and the love as Jesus loved. When we know ourselves accurately, we become recipients of spectacular grace that we are able to give away freely and patiently. Because he knew his own sins and God's grace, the high priest was able to 'deal gently with the ignorant and wayward' (Heb. 5:2; cf. Heb 4:12-5:3). May we learn to know and do likewise.

The second reaction is to excuse sin. We euphemize, whitewash, re-label, evade, rationalize and blame. We get defensive about ourselves and we try to excuse others. This strategy is at work throughout the modern psychologies. It is part of their allure that they pretend to reflect deep and determinative knowledge about the human soul, yet they evade the essential problem of the soul. But when we know grace, we have no reason not to look in the mirror frankly and no reason not to help others look in the mirror. Indeed, we look in the mirror so that our hearts might be remade as we shout with exultation."

- David Powlison, "Questions at the Crossroads: The Care of Souls & Modern Psychotherapies" in Care for the Soul: Exploring the Intersection of Psychology & Theology, ed. Mark McMinn and Timothy Phillips (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP, 2001), pp. 50-51.

The Real Me

I continue to make my way through One Nation Under Therapy when I'm not doing required reading. I'm currently in a chapter titled "From Sin to Syndrome" which deals with the various ways in which violent and immoral behavior is either medicalized or explained in terms of some psychological deficit. The authors quote Anthony Daniels, a British psychiatrist who works with prison inmates:

That criminals often shift the locus of responsibility for their acts elsewhere is illustrated by some of the expressions they use most frequently in their consultations with me. Describing, for example, their habitual loss of temper, which leads them to assault whomever displeases them sufficiently, they
say, "My head goes," or "My head just went."

Sommers and Satel go on to say that Daniels has observed that many of the convicts he works with share a distinct theory of the self that he calls the doctrine of the "Real Me":

The Real Me has little or nothing to do with the self who breaks into houses, uses drugs and alcohol, and beats his wife and children. "No, the 'Real Me' is an immaculate conception, untouched by human conduct: it is the unassailable core of virtue that enables me to retain my self-respect whatever I do."

This morning at World Net Daily, I read an article about Mary Carey, a porn star (whose real name is Mary Ellen Cook). You may recall that she was among a host of unlikely candidates in the running to become California's next governor following the recall of Gray Davis. Now she's in the news because she is scheduled to attend next week's President's Dinner and Salute to Freedom, a $2,500 per plate event sponsored by the National Republican Congressional Committee. Carey says that it would be an honor to meet President Bush with whom she'd like to talk about freedom of speech and the crackdown on the adult film industry. She'd also like to get some pointers from the Commander in Chief as to how she might advance her political career.

Carey claims to be a Christian whose daily routine consists of Bible reading and prayer. She dismisses the thought that her lifestyle is at odds with her profession, saying:

"I probably have less sex with those guys than any college girl [typically has]. It doesn't make me less moral," she said. "I'm sure a lot of Christians have had sex before marriage. God reads my heart. I'm a good person. ... I think I have more morals than the politicians in office. I don't rob, steal, hurt, or lie - a lot of politicians do that."

That Carey adheres to the doctrine of the "Real Me" is evident in her reaction to a question about how her pornographic occupation is consistent with the biblical prohibition of adultery: "Bill Clinton committed adultery. [Doing] adult movies is acting, portraying a role. It's not Mary Ellen Cook, the real me."

Interesting that Ms. Carey uses everyone but God as her moral point of reference - promiscuous college coeds, politicians, and, last but not least, former President Bill Clinton. She has established a self-righteous system that allows her to soothe her conscience by telling herself she's not as bad as those "truly evil people."

Of course, we don't have to go to prison inmates and porn stars to find instances of this kind of self-justifying activity. Proverbs tells us that it's universal: "Every man's way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the hearts" (21:2). Each of us is prone to self-deceptive pride that entices us to preserve the illusion of a pristine "Real Me" while attributing our wicked actions to factors outside our selves.

I hope Mary Carey does read the Bible every day. Likewise, I hope she'll soon read and consider Jesus' teaching in Mark 7:21-23: "For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

Carey's right. God does read our hearts - but he doesn't compare them to the texts of other lives. He judges them by the standard of his own moral purity. This is why we need the Savior.