Fast Facts on False Teachings

Christian Psychology

Colossians 2:8 Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ.

If the Christian media serve as a barometer of the whole church, a dramatic shift is taking place. Christian radio, for example, once a bastion of Bible teaching and Christian music, is overrun with talk shows, pop psychology, and phone-in psychotherapy. And Christian radio is the major advertising tool for the selling of psychology - which is pulling in money by the billions.

The church is thereby ingesting heavy doses of dogma from psychology, adopting secular "wisdom" and attempting to sanctify it by calling it Christian. Evangelicalism’s most fundamental values are thus being redefined. "Mental and emotional health" is the new buzzword. It is not a biblical concept, though many seem to equate it with spiritual wholeness. Sin is called sickness, so people think it requires therapy, not repentance. Habitual sin is called addictive or compulsive behavior, and many surmise its solution is medical care rather than moral correction. We call this redefinition of biblical terms into psychological language psychobabble. The emphasis on psychology in the Church is labeled by many psychoheresy.

Christians who seek to integrate secular psychology with the Bible would have you believe that our soul care was deficient and ineffective for all the centuries up until our own, when certain godless men "discovered" the previously hidden principles to help hurting people. That’s just nonsense!

Nevertheless, believers readily embrace Christian psychology. Pastor and author John MacArthur writes,

"There may be no more serious threat to the life of the church today than the stampede to embrace the doctrines of secular psychology. They are a mass of human ideas that Satan has placed in the church as if they were powerful, life-changing truths from God…The result is that pastors, biblical scholars, teachers of Scripture, and caring believers using the Word of God are disdained as naive, simplistic, and altogether inadequate counselors. Bible reading and prayer are commonly belittled as "pat answers," incomplete solutions for someone struggling with depression or anxiety. Scripture, the Holy Spirit, Christ, prayer, and grace - those are the traditional solutions Christian counselors have pointed people to. But the average Christian today has come to believe that none of them really offers the cure for people's woes" (Our Sufficiency In Christ, p. 60.)

We’ll need to define and understand a few terms before we can go on. They are: psychology, biblical psychology, non-biblical psychology, secular psychology, and Christian psychology:

1. "Psychology" simply means the study of the soul. It is the attempt to understand the nature of mankind and how to transform that nature. As such, it can be truly done only by Christians, since only Christians have the resources for the understanding and the transformation of the soul of man.
2. Biblical Psychology sees Scripture as the comprehensive manual for understanding and transforming the nature of man. The Bible has the diagnosis and treatment of every spiritual matter. It’s goal is to see every believer, by the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, become more like Jesus Christ. Biblical psychology is nothing new. The Puritans called their ministry with people "soul work"; others called it "soul care." Today we commonly refer to biblical psychology as "counseling," although not all Christian counseling is biblical.
3. Non-biblical psychology is the discovery of certain techniques which serve to lessen trauma or dependency and modify behavior in either Christians or non-Christians. For example: As a Chaplain I have been trained to provide stress debriefing for emergency services and law enforcement personnel that have been involved in a critical incident. The techniques involve guided discussion that help mitigate stress.
4. Secular psychology is the "psychology" most of you are familiar with. It is the theories of human nature and behavior based on the writings of secular, godless men such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, B.F. Skinner, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers. Psychotherapy is the techniques involved in treating people based upon these diverse theories.
5. Christian psychology is the attempt to integrate biblical psychology and secular psychology. That is what we want to talk about.

We can’t really discuss Christian psychology until we take a look at secular psychology – what it is Christians are trying to integrate with the Bible. Let’s look at the key contributors to secular psychology that I previously mentioned.

Sigmund Freud was one of the founding fathers of contemporary psychiatric thought and therapy. He began as a medical researcher in neurology and almost won the Nobel prize for his scientific research into pain relief and analgesics. His experiments involved opium, to which he became addicted. Lacking the funding for his research and the interest in general surgical practice, Freud felt compelled to pursue the more profitable and intriguing world of psychiatric counseling.

At the foundation of Freud's thought was the belief that people are ruled by their unconscious minds. He believed that human behaviors, responses, and attitudes are governed by primitive urges combined with a vast horde of personal experiences of which they have no knowledge or conscious control. Essentially, Freud saw man as an instinct-ruled beast dominated primarily by the drives of sex and aggression.

Based on this view of man, Freud created psychoanalysis, a technique that involves the patient lying on a couch and free-associating (saying whatever comes to mind). The goal of this process is to uncover the patient's unconscious motivations. The analyst does this by interpreting the patient's so-called defenses and transferences so that he can decode and reveal to the patient the origins of his attitudes and behavior.

Freud believed that therapy could help patients know the origins of their behaviors, thereby gaining personal awareness and understanding. But in reality this type of therapy accomplishes much more. It affirms a concept that sinful human beings universally hold dear - that they are not responsible for their actions. Someone else is to blame. By placing the responsibility for their behavior on their parents, environment, childhood trauma, the unconscious, or "primitive urges," patients are permitted - even encouraged - to assume a victim mentality. They are never confronted with their personal responsibility for their behavior, but must wade through years of analysis (at horrendous cost!) to discover what in their past makes them behave the way they do.

Numerous psychoanalytic myths devised by Freud are imbedded in our culture. Many people believe them as if they are facts. The following statements are Freudian myths:

1. The id, ego, and superego are actual parts of the human psyche.

2. A person’s unconscious drives behavior more than his conscious mind chooses behavior.

3. Dreams are keys to understanding the unconscious and thus the person.

4. Present behavior is determined by unresolved conflicts from childhood.

5. Many people are in denial because they have repressed unpleasant memories into the unconscious.

6. Parents are to blame for most people’s problems.

7. People need insight into their past to make significant changes in thoughts, attitudes and actions.

8. Children must successfully pass through their "psychosexual stages" of development or they will suffer from neurosis later on.

9. If I am to experience significant change, I must remember and re-experience painful incidents in my past.

10. The first five years of life determine what a person will be like when he grows up.

11. Everything that has ever happened to me is located in my unconscious mind.

12. People use unconscious defense mechanisms to cope with life.

It was in the area of personal accountability to the God of the Bible that Freud parted company with his Jewish heritage. Freud hated the idea of God, and especially the God of the Jews and His Son - (as Freud saw it) the God of the gentiles. He viewed religious behavior as at best a "neurosis." He did not believe that man possessed a soul.

The overwhelming majority of Christians have probably never heard of Carl Jung, but his influence in the church is vast and affects sermons, books, and activities, such as the prolific use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) by seminaries and missionary organizations. A current, popular example of Jung's legacy can be seen in Robert Hicks's book The Masculine Journey, which was given to each of the 50,000 men who attended the 1993 Promise Keepers conference.

Jung went beyond Freud' s theory of the unconscious by combining it with a spiritual dimension, which he called the collective unconscious. According to this theory, all human beings possess in their unconscious a deeply buried collective history of the race. This commonly shared knowledge is the seat of our identity as persons, represented by hundreds of archetypes, or symbols, of universally significant persons (i.e., mother, father, etc.). According Jung, the collective unconscious is also the dwelling place of God.

He delved deeply into the occult, practiced necromancy, and had daily contact with disembodied spirits, which he called archetypes. Much of what he wrote was inspired by such entities. Jung had his own familiar spirit whom he called Philemon. At first he thought Philemon was part of his own psyche, but later on he found that Philemon was more than an expression of his own inner self. Jung says:

"Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I… Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru^" (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 183.)

According to Jung, Jesus represented the primordial image of the Anthropas, the son of man and son of God. He accomplished deliverance for the enslaved people of the first century from the "divinity" of Augustus. It was in this capacity of redeemer that He became part of the collective psyche of the first century. Jung saw this as consistent with the saving capacity that had been evidenced in other redeemers at other times in history. Jung didn't care if Jesus was King of Kings and Lord of Lords. All that mattered was His meaning as an archetype. Jesus became the symbol of sacrifice and deity, not the true Savior. According to Jungians, Jesus functions symbolically as an archetype for redeemer, meeting the need shared by all people for redemption.

Since Jesus exists as an archetype in the collective unconscious, we can encounter Him via active imagination. This theory of receptive visualization has its ancient roots in Tantric yoga, which deeply affected both Buddhism and Hinduism. Students are taught to visualize the image of the deity and to construct this image on their mental screens by active imagination. Agnes Sanford popularized both the visualizing techniques and this teaching of Jung's in the church. In The Healing Gifts of the Spirit Sanford claimed that Jesus entered into the collective unconscious of the human race and is by this means available for healing and help. Her basis for these claims is not the Bible, but Carl Jung.

Jung's Jesus is more like a spirit guide than the Lord of history. Jung believed that the goal of therapy is not healing, but coming into contact with one's collective unconscious - a process he called individuation. During individuation the true self, the strongest archetype in the collective unconscious, is brought into greater consciousness. This process is considered therapeutic because it supposedly leads to wholeness or a realization of personhood. It forms the basis for the contemporary practice of receptive visualization as it is currently being practiced in the church, particularly in "healing ministries."

B. F. Skinner was the creator of the well-known classic behavioral view of human beings. Skinner saw the mind as a black box, a series of circuits, a collection of stimulus-response connections. He rejected the idea that a person has meaning or significance. Like Freud, he defied the existence of the soul. And he also rejected God on a personal level, although he certainly maintained a religious worldview. In his acclaimed utopian novel, Walden Two, Skinner's namesake, Frazier, identified himself with Christ.

Skinner taught you could alter human behavior through a method called behavior modification that utilized positive reinforcement. It disregards the human capacity for love, patience, self-control, mercy, long-suffering, or joy. Inherent in the concept of positive reinforcement is the destruction of the personal dignity of a human being, hence the denial of personal responsibility or need to control one's thoughts, words, or deeds. The goal of behavioral therapists is to have clients manipulate their emotional and physical circumstances in such a way as to avoid pain and promote pleasure.

Maslow spent most of his teaching career at Brandeis University. Judging orthodox behaviorism and psychoanalysis to be too rigidly theoretical and concerned with illness, he developed a theory of motivation describing the process by which an individual progresses from basic needs such as food and sex to the highest needs of what he called self-actualization - the fulfillment of one's greatest human potential. Humanistic psychotherapy, usually in the form of group therapy, seeks to help the individual progress through these stages.

Carl Rogers grew up in a Christian home and came to New York City to study theology at Union Theological Seminary. Not surprisingly, Rogers became increasingly disillusioned with his theological studies at Union - an institution at the forefront of liberalism in the early twentieth century. Certainly, Rogers could not have gotten any answers to hard questions concerning his spiritual life.

At the same time, and just across the street, stood Columbia University, with its cutting-edge clinical psychology program. Union Seminary had no answers. But Columbia offered Rogers humanistic solutions.

The young Rogers ate humanism up and never looked back to Christianity, except in dismay and disgust. However, his psychology retained a religious or spiritual character. As Rogers aged, the spiritual nature of his work became more evident, especially as he faced the death of his wife. He looked for answers, not in psychology and certainly not in Christianity, but in the occult - with its mediums, seances, and Ouija boards. He claimed to have communicated with his dead wife, who told him to have a good time in a relationship he had begun with a woman during the final stages of his wife's illness. Instead of guilt and condemnation, Rogers received his dead wife's empathy and unconditional positive regard (UPR) toward his adultery.

In contrast to Freud, Rogers saw human beings as good and perfectible. He believed they needed only the guidance that was already within themselves, just waiting to be vitalized by using nondirective techniques. Rogers, like Freud, didn't believe in giving advice, only in recognizing feelings. Rogerian counselors are easily recognized by their infuriating tendency to paraphrase every statement made by their clients and then to smile in a nonjudgmental way while waiting with unconditional positive regard for the next statement. They believe that as clients come to resonate with their feelings and as they experience the counselor’s empathy and unconditional positive regard, they will be made whole (healed). In effect, the client uses the counselor as a positive mirror to the inner self, reflecting with approval what the client sees within.

Rogers insisted there is nothing that can break into a person to help him resolve the dilemma of his suffering. There is no revelation. Thus Rogerians deny the existence of standards and absolutes and the propensity of people toward evil.

Those, then, are the leading secular psychologists. Their theories and techniques, and countless others based on them, are the secular psychology that Christians seek to integrate with the Bible to form Christian psychology.

But, as you can see, secular psychology is not even a single, uniform scientific system – like physics or biology. It is a complex menagerie of theories and techniques, many of which are in conflict with one another. The Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) is an organization of psychologists who are professing Christians. The following was admitted at one of their meetings:

"We are often asked if we are "Christian psychologists" and find it difficult to answer since we don’t know what the question implies. We are Christians who are psychologists but at the present time there is no acceptable Christian psychology that is markedly different from non-Christian psychology. It is difficult to imply that we function in a manner that is fundamentally distinct from our non-Christian colleagues... as yet there is not an acceptable theory, mode of research or treatment methodology that is distinctly Christian."

Secular psychology is not really a science at all – it is a philosophy. It is a worldly, man-centered philosophy that is completely at odds with the teachings of the Bible about the nature of mankind. Christian psychology – the attempt to integrate secular psychology and the Bible – is really an effort to embrace the philosophies of the godless, Christ-rejecting world.

In Colossians 2:8 we read,

Colossians 2:8 Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ.

Philosophy is man's way of viewing man and life and how to help and/or change people.

Empty deceit involves humanly contrived ways of thinking that originate in spiritual deception and therefore are not built upon true godly realities.

The tradition of man is another area of dangerous enticement, because it is merely man passing on to man that which seemed to be useful or desirable.

Closely related to these traditions are the basic principles of the world which represents the contemporary, conventional wisdom and accepted procedures of society.

We are to watch out for and sound the alarm about these perspectives on life. We are not to welcome them into the church. We are not to integrate them into our message and ministry. This certainly includes the psychological theories of man. We must not allow anyone to lead us into these directions. This warning and prohibition applies no matter how well educated, intended, popular, or influential in the church a leader may be. Beware, lest anyone captivate your thinking through any of these matters.

Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world' (John 18:36). How can we mix the wisdom of the kingdom of man with the kingdom of God? God's pronouncement on the wisdom of this world is given in First Corinthians 3:19-20

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, 'He catches the wise in their own craftiness'; and again, 'the Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile."

All of these psychological theoreticians who have intrigued the church in our day seem so brilliant, when measured against other humans. However, before God, they are foolish, because they did not learn from God, but rather, from their own vain imaginations. Also, the Lord is fully aware of the thoughts of the wise. He knows all about the theories of those who possess special measures of human genius, like Freud, Jung, Skinner, Maslow, Rogers, and on and on. He says their thoughts are futile. That word means useless, vain, empty. They are of no value to God in developing His kingdom and building the lives of His people. We must be watching out for anything that is not according to Christ. Only Jesus Christ and His ways and His truth are to be guiding and shaping our lives.

Our Lord Jesus reacted in a perfect and holy way to every temptation, trial, and trauma in life - and they were more severe than any human could ever suffer. Therefore, it should be clear that perfect victory over all life's troubles must be the result of being like Christ.

No "soul worker" can lift another above the level of spiritual maturity he is on. So the supreme qualification for psychologists would be Christlikeness.

If one is a truly biblical "psychologist," he must be doing soul work in the realm of the deep things of the Word and the Spirit - not fooling around in the shallows of behavior modification. Why should a believer choose to do behavior modification when he has the tools for spiritual transformation (like a surgeon wreaking havoc with a butter knife instead of using a scalpel)? The most skilled counselor is the one who most carefully, prayerfully, and faithfully applies divine sanctification – shaping another into the image of Jesus Christ.

There is a psychological way and a biblical way to understand human nature and to transform the lives of people. The psychological way is the way of psychotherapy, which is simply the treatment of problems of living by psychological, man-made means. By applying techniques and methodologies based on psychological theories, a psychologically trained counselor attempts to assist an individual to change attitudes, feelings, perceptions, values, and behavior.

Psychotherapists are those who are trained and licensed to perform a wide variety of therapies. They include psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, marriage and family counselors, some social workers, and many who call themselves Christian psychologists, Christian counselors, and even biblical counselors. In addition, many individuals practice psychotherapy without a license and many of the self-help systems are psychotherapies in practice without being named as such.

Most Christians agree that the Bible is the basis for living the Christian life, but very few seem to believe that the Bible is sufficient to deal with all problems of living, which include those nonorganically caused categories of behavior that now carry psychiatric and psychological diagnostic labels. Many in the church believe that the Bible provides preventative principles for mental-emotional-behavioral well-being, but hesitate to accept that the Bible contains restorative power. We maintain that God and His Word provide a completely sufficient foundation for living the Christian life, which would include mental-emotional-behavioral health.