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Hell

Theology

why Christians can’t trust psychology

At PCC, one of the classes I had to take was “Educational Psychology,” and I was initially puzzled that PCC had a class like that, let alone required every education major to take it. The world I grew up in has a deep, deep distrust of psychology– I can’t even number the times I heard it referred to as as a pseudoscience, like there’s no more truth in psychology than there is in phrenology. There’s an entire cottage industry inside conservative Christianity for “biblical” or “nouthetic” counseling as an alternative to secular therapy methods, which I strongly recommend everyone avoid.

When I got into the class, though, the confusion evaporated. The only “textbook” we were going to read for the class was called Why Christians Can’t Trust Psychology, and the class only covered two topics: why every psychological theory about education is wrong, and how to emotionally abuse children in a classroom setting (which they called “classroom discipline”). Unfortunately, it was a class I did extremely well in.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog talking about Christian culture’s aversion to psychology– there’s a fivepart series on “biblical counseling” and an entire review series on Tim LaHaye’s How to Win Over Depression. Most of that time has been spent trying to show how that point of view is at odds with the evidence: therapy is helpful and can be an incredibly healing experience, while the “methods” that nouthetic “counselors” pursue have been demonstrated to merely re-traumatize victims and cause even more harm.

However, many Christians are willing to speak at length about why they don’t trust psychology, and most of it revolves around how they think it’s impossible to treat spiritual problems — because all mental health issues are of course really spiritual problems– without recognizing the Truth. Psychology, they say, tries to tell us that we’re fine and good and we just need to talk things out, while the Truth of the matter is that we’re not fine and we’re most definitely not good and we need repentance, not therapy.

Interestingly, I’ve never really addressed this claim. I’ve largely ignored it, because I was trying to show that Christians can benefit from therapy, and that the nouthetic approach to “counseling” is damaging and dangerous. However, the more I learn about psychology and therapy, the more I realize that these Christians are right to identify psychology as a threat to their faith system. Modern psychology and therapeutic techniques are fundamentally at odds with evangelical and fundamentalist theology.

I’m hardly the first person to notice this. Most of the Christians I knew growing up have been shouting about this as long as I’ve been alive or could remember. I just didn’t really see it the way they did. How could something capable of bringing healing and peace– backed up by rigorous study– be diametrically opposed to a theological system? All therapists are doing is helping us identify and respond to our emotions in a way that doesn’t cause more harm, and psychiatrists are just trying to find chemical imbalances so we can fix them. How is any of that opposed to Christianity?

And then I started looking into things like cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, and encountered a concept known as negative and positive cognitions (link opens a PDF). As you can see, essentially every single “negative cognition”– the side of the chart that CBT/EMDR therapy methods are attempting to counteract with a “positive cognition”– is not just openly acknowledged by conservative Christianity but actively taught as essential doctrine. Evangelicalism is trying to get everyone to believe in the “negative cognition” side of the chart, while modern therapy wants the opposite.

I am a bad person. Mark 10:18, “no one is good.”
I am shameful. Isiah 64:6, we are “filthy rags” (or used feminine pads, עִדָּה means “menstruation“)
I deserve only bad things. … basically every verse interpreted as “you deserve hell’s damnation.”
My judgement cannot be trusted. Jeremiah 17:9, our heart is “deceitful” and “desperately wicked.”
I am not in control. I Chronicles 29:11-12, God is the “ruler of all things.”
I have to be perfect. Matthew 5:48,” be perfect as God is perfect.”
I am permanently damaged. Ephesians 2:1-3, we are “dead in our sin,” and wrathful “by nature.”
I am in danger. Hebrews 9:27, we are “appointed to die” and then face “judgement.”

All of the others from the chart are echoes of these, in my opinion, and I’m sure we could all sit down and think of many more verses that are used to badger us into believing that we are disgusting worms condemned by a mighty god to eternal torment. These are ideas identified by modern psychology as being harmful to our mental and emotional health, and should be overcome– and I agree. These are also just some of the theological foundations of the Christian evangelical and fundamentalist religion. The Sovereignty of God, Original Sin, and Eternal Conscious Torment … you can’t get any deeper into the bedrock of that theological system. Contradicting these also means that you’re contradicting another foundational idea: the inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture.

I didn’t see this before. To me, therapy became just a helpful tool and equally as routine and normal as getting my blood pressure checked. I left behind fundamentalist teachings about psychology long before I started looking for secular therapy, so I didn’t realize how deeply it contradicted the faith system of my childhood. And because I started interacting with more “normal” evangelical Christians who also thought therapy was a good idea and “biblical counseling” is a load of poppycock, it didn’t really occur to me to examine how the fundamental assumptions of each might gainsay each other.

I take all of this as just another indication that American Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism are unhealthy to their core. They do not promote mental, emotional, or spiritual well-being and instead lead to lifelong damage. A few years ago I adopted what I think was Jesus’ hermenuetic: a good tree cannot bear bad fruit. If an interpretation or application of Scripture leads to harming myself or others, it is bearing bad fruit and should not be considered a credible interpretation. Doctrines like eternal torment and original sin cause harm; therefore, they should be rejected. I will prefer readings and interpretations that prioritize love and justice–not empty, meaningless wrath and shame.

Theology

“Radical” review: 141-160

With a title like “There is No Plan B: Why Going is Urgent, Not Optional,” it should be obvious that this is one of those chapters were David and I definitely disagree. In fact, one of the biggest things I disagree with him on appears on the first page:

Applied to faith, this [equality] means that in a world where different people have different religious views, all such views should be treated as fundamentally equal. In this system of thinking, faith is a matter of taste, not of truth. (141)

What a reductionist view. Unfortunately, I understand where he’s coming from. David’s view of theology is one of the reasons why Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism can occasionally appear identical. If you believe in the Eternal Conscious Torment model of hell and that the only way to avoid being burned alive for all of eternity is to “receive the gospel,” then you cannot afford to be wrong. There are enormous and extremely permanent consequences to what you think about God, Jesus, the Atonement, and soteriology. If you’re convinced of this sequence, then you’re going to have serious problems with pluralism, as you should if you’re a decent person on any level.

However, all of that is one of the biggest reasons why I believe that the evangelical conceptualization of theology is immoral, and that their religion is based on an immoral deity. At one point David tries to argue that concerns like mine are a matter of “emotion” (148), but they’re not. It’s a matter of morality. Asking whether or not God condemns people to eternal conscious torment because they’ve never heard the gospel — and their only option for hearing the gospel is dependent on flawed beings– isn’t an emotional question, it’s a moral one with high emotional stakes. Many people, myself included, have concluded that a god who behaves like that would be, possibly, the most evil creature to ever exist.

David’s argument has one core problem: out one side of his mouth he says that people are not condemned to eternal conscious torment because they never heard of Jesus, but because they “rejected God” (144-45); the other side of his mouth says that accepting God is defined by receiving the gospel (153). He’s forced into this position by the Bible as things like the Hall of Faith in Hebrews make “hearing the gospel” an impossible standard. Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah– they’d never heard of Jesus, had no understanding whatsoever of the evangelical definition of “the gospel.” He tries to wiggle around this by saying that “they were trusting in the redemption God would bring through Christ” but this comes after ten pages of him saying that people “doing their best with the information they have” are condemned to burn for all eternity. How Abraham doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “did his best with the information he had at the time” is beyond me.

The logic pattern of “all people have knowledge of God, and all people reject God” is internally consistent, however it’s based in the premise that all people have knowledge of the Christian god, and that premise is a far cry from being realistic, let alone proven. Supposedly, according to David, the Christian god does something to reveal themself in such a way that it’s possible for every single last person on the planet to have consciously rejected them. This manifestation cannot look like Tonatiuh, or Ra, or Belenos, or Yuyi, or Sol … for reasons that no one has ever demonstrated to me convincingly. Because I said so is about as far as they get, usually.

There’s no logical separation between “God condemns us to hell because we’ve never heard of Jesus” and “God condemns us to hell for rejecting themself” when the mechanism of accepting the Christian God is fallible humans preaching the gospel. That is a morally repugnant position. If the eternal damnation of billions of souls rests on people being healthy enough, wealthy enough, educated enough, and self-sacrificing enough to go to “unreached people groups” and talk about Jesus, then Christianity is a catastrophic moral failure on a scale I can barely comprehend. But this is what David believes (156).

He believes this because of a fairly common problem in evangelicalism: he reads the Pauline letters in isolation. Without Jesus, without James, without John the Revelator, it seems inevitable for people who embrace biblical inspiration to arrive at this conclusion. However, Paul is only one man, and a fallible one. His perspective is not the sum total of soteriology, and his articulation is only one view. This is why we have the collected library of Scripture. Paul, held in balance with James, John, and Peter, and viewed in light of the words of Christ helps paint us a complex and nuanced picture of faith.

I don’t hold with the position that the gospel is “Jesus died on the cross to cover your sins with his blood so that you can be admitted to heaven.” I believe that the gospel is far more rich than that. I believe that Jesus’ entire life and earthly ministry is “the Good News,” and that reducing faith to a single, solitary belief is to make Jesus almost totally irrelevant. I believe that Jesus came to save sinners, but the question is how. I believe that he wants each of us to do what he did– to serve, to heal, to liberate, to love. I believe that Christianity isn’t about a single question. It’s about Jesus’ entire life. It’s about our entire life.

Seeing the gospel in this light enables me to read the same passages as David does and see a message of hope and encouragement instead of despair. I don’t see a world condemned to burn, but a world that desperately needs us to love it. I can grieve with Paul in the opening to Romans as he looks around and sees so many terrible things. Each of us should be compelled to grieve for all the ways the world is broken and all the ways it breaks us. It should make us angry, like it made Paul angry … but it doesn’t stop there in Romans, and it shouldn’t end there for us, either. Romans continues to assure us that Jesus’ life– the gospel– makes it possible for things to be different. I believe that Paul is trying to show us that our broken world can be repaired.

Social Issues

patterns of abuse

hitler

A friend of ours came to visit this weekend, and we’d intended to go up to D.C. to see the cherry blossoms, but very few of the trees are blossoming so we found some indoor things to do because it was raining all day. Handsome and I have been wanting to visit the Holocaust Memorial, but we didn’t realize that there are only so many passes given out in a day, so we ended up only seeing one of the temporary exhibits downstairs: “Some were Neighbors.” It’s devoted to answering the question “how was this atrocity possible? How could people have let it happen?” and it discussed the reality of collaboration during the Third Reich.

One of my chronic health issues reared its rather ugly head by that point in the afternoon, so I sat outside the exhibit on a padded bench while I waited for Handsome and our friend to finish. As I sat there, I overheard the conversations of people exiting, and most of them were about the same thing– if you had been there, what would you have done?

It was a powerful question, and probably one we should be asking ourselves more often. There are all sorts of evil in this world that we are complicit in for a variety of reasons, mostly apathy and ignorance. But what was interesting to me about the nature of these conversations was that most people focused on what they felt were two options: try to protect your Jewish neighbors by risking yourself and your family, or turn your Jewish neighbors in to protect yourself and your family.

Most of the people exiting had the luxury of being able to ask that question and have only two options. They have time, distance, and their comfortable lives in a democratic government. They’re not asking what should we do? while living under the totalitarian control of Hitler’s Third Reich.

Obviously, I have no idea what Nazi Germany was like, not personally. However, I have spent a significant amount of time buried in research about how Hitler motivated and controlled the German people– and one thing that has helped me understand that time in Germany’s history is to think of it in terms of abuse. This is a massive oversimplification, but Germany was in an abusive relationship with Adolf Hitler.

I’ve had the unfortunate experience of being in both an abusive romantic relationship, and I also spent the bulk of my life in a totalitarian, thought-controlled abusive community. To an extremely limited extent, I can understand what it must have been like to be a non-Jewish German citizen in the 30s and 40s. I know that for many people living under the Third Reich, the question what should I do? didn’t have two clearly different answers, and they weren’t asking the question under what seems to be extremely obvious terms to us: that sending people to concentration camps was heinously evil.

To someone living during Hitler’s regime, it is quite possible that sending people to the concentration camps was seen as a necessary evil– perhaps, to some, even a good thing. To us, that seems insane. How could anyone have possibly seen the concentration camps in those ways?

It could happen– in the same way that I believed, to the core of myself, that I needed to be hurt in order to become a better person. I was convinced that what my abuser was putting me through was making me into the person I’d always believed I needed to be. Yes, it was hard. Yes, it was painful. Yes, the people outside of our relationship didn’t understand— but it was necessary. I needed him to hurt me.

It could happen– in the same way that I grew up being taught that some people deserved to be tortured eternally for the sin of rejecting Christ. I believed that someone could reject Christ without ever knowing who he was, without ever hearing his name or knowing about his life. I believed that God held every human being that has ever lived, breathed, and died, accountable, and if they were not fortunate enough to live in a place that knew about Christianity, that they would be made to burn for the rest of eternity in a reality that would never cease to be the most excruciatingly painful thing anyone could possibly experience. I not only believed that eternal conscious torment was a reality, I believed that it was necessary. I believed that God’s righteousness demanded it. I believed that in order for God to be holy, that sin must be punished– and the only possible way for that to happen was a literal Hell.

Perhaps, for the people of Germany, it was something like that. Perhaps they received the same sorts of comforts I did. In my relationship, I had the honor and privilege of being good enough for him. I was proud to be his girlfriend, his fiance, and I was going to be proud to be his wife, of being worthy of that title.

In my church, I knew that we were special. We had the truth. We knew what needed to be done. We were called to live a life of holiness, of separation. We would not associate with Belial. And we were commanded to do that by our leader– the one God had put over us, the one who God had called to shepherd us. He was responsible for us. He would direct us. He would show us how to live clean, pure, godly lives.

In that way, I think I can understand. I can understand the simultaneous terror and wonder. Of being fearful of the consequences of disobeying, but caught up in the majestic promises, swept along with the victories . . . and willing to ignore the atrocities.