It is right to see all you here, and I know so many have joined us virtually.
And it's a real pleasure for me to introduce, doctor David Entwistle.
We got to know each other back in the mid to late eighties, and, we both attended the same small church in New England.
And I was in the process of earning my clinical doctorate in psychology.
And David was at his first, postdoc job.
And, one of the things I learned very early about David was never to tell him the food that you didn't like because then you knew that you were gonna get invited to his house for him to prepare that food that you didn't like.
And fortunately, he's a great cook, at least with ham loaf, which might be known or unknown to many of you.
But, delicious meal.
And, he's currently, in faculty at North Greenville University as a distinguished professor of psychology.
His BA is from Taylor University in psychology and his master's and doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Rosemead School of Psychology at Loyola University.
He's a licensed psychologist.
He's provided type of therapy in residential and outpatient settings, and most recently has provided clinical services to residents of long term care facility who suffer from chronic medical and psychological conditions.
Probably of note for our audience this evening, his first post doc job was working as a psycho psychologist at the House of Affirmation in Massachusetts, where he worked with Catholic, priest, and religious who had psychological difficulties.
He knows that it was during this time with them that it really gave him an enormous respect for the dedication of brothers, sisters, and priests.
A memory that he has shared with me was talking about faith issues with an older priest, A dear memory in which at the conclusion of that talk, if older priest looked at him and said, David, I honestly think I'm going to see you in heaven.
And David said, father, I honestly think I'm going to see you there too.
And so part of our dialogue and discussion tonight is to look much at the commonalities that evangelical Protestants have with Roman Catholic thought in this area of psychology and theology.
He's also Emeritus professor of psychology at Malone, where he taught undergraduate psychology, graduate counseling, and graduate Christian ministries from 1996 to 2020.
He's been a visiting professor in Poland.
He's led learning teams to Poland, Albania, Hong Kong, spent several summers as a child in Africa, with, mission stations with his family.
He's published a number of books and chapters and articles.
I won't go through the whole list, but the book that you'll be talking about tonight is the integrative approaches to psychology and Christianity, an introduction to worldview issues, philosophical foundations, and models of integration.
And I just heard today that the fourth edition is almost going to be soon published.
And, I can remember still the call that we had when I first came to, the DMU, back in the mid, probably 2014, 2015.
And David was saying, hey.
I'm thinking about adding a Catholic model to my book and, was kind enough to send us the draft.
And I know doctor Titus was involved in looking at it, giving feedback.
So we've actually had quite a long interaction back and forth.
And, just delighted that you can be with us, like your lovely wife can be with us too tonight.
And after the lecture, doctor Nordling and doctor Goodes, will have a panel discussion and to talk about the lecture and information of psychology and Christianity.
So welcome, David.
So glad you could be with us.
Thank you.
Thank you for your gracious introduction, Harvey.
It's always dangerous when someone introduces you who knows you well enough that they know where the bodies are buried.
I deeply appreciate the work of divine mercy in developing its Catholic Christian meta model of the person because it is a contribution not only to Catholic scholarship, but to Christian faith learning integration more broadly.
So whatever small degree I may be engaged in the same divine service, I'm happy to walk on this road with you as a fellow traveler.
As I prepared for this lecture, I sought to learn more about the person for whom this lecture series is named.
And I discovered maybe.
There we go.
And I discovered that John Henry Newman and I have several things in common despite vast differences in time and place.
Newman's spiritual journey meandered down several roads from non religious to evangelical to Anglican to Catholic.
He was raised by an anti religious father and a religious mother of the Huguenot Calvinist tradition that emerged in France.
While at boarding school, he had an evangelical Christian religious conversion at the age of 15.
He later embarked on the Canterbury Road becoming an Anglican.
Later still, he converted to Catholicism and is remembered for his influence on Catholic theology and higher education.
I resonate with many of the themes that I see in Newman's life as I will discuss momentarily.
As we begin a discussion about the journey to integrate Christian faith and psychology, it may be helpful to talk about, excuse me, who we are as travelers.
In Gregory Schoesser's Canterbury Tales, the characters take turns telling stories as they embark on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, the center of Anglican religious life.
Each of the characters' stories reveals something about the disposition and outlook of the tower Of Storytellers.
Most of you are walking this journey not as generic Christians, but as Roman Catholic Christians.
And that gives you unique insights into faith learning integration from a Catholic perspective.
And, of course, your personal life experiences and traits shape how you see the world and how you engage psychology.
I am traveling this road as a reformed evangelical Christian, though one who has worked in the evangelical and Catholic institutions and who currently worships in an Anglican church.
So one of the things I need to do is to spend a moment explaining how my own religious background influences me on this journey.
I have been raised and educated in the evangelical tradition, and a reformed theological framework has deeply influenced my life and my approach to integration.
However, I generally avoid the term evangelical today unless I have the opportunity to describe what an evangelical is and what an evangelical is not.
The necessity of doing so has come about because of the emergence of what is often called the white evangelical voter.
Furthermore, recent research shows that many self described evangelicals do not actually hold evangelical theological positions.
For our purposes, we will describe evangelicalism as as a as a diverse collection of Christians around the world who subscribe to a handful of theological positions.
A high view of the authority of scripture, the belief in salvation through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the importance of personal conversion and sharing the good news of the gospel with others, and an emphasis on individual sanctification or becoming more Christ like.
These propositions are fairly broad and characterize Christian belief across many denominations.
So when I use the term evangelical from here on out, this is what I have in mind rather than the sorts of definitions used by pollsters, journalists, and political pundits.
I've also been shared by several specific evangelical streams of thought, in particular, the reformed tradition, which has had a major influence on Protestant Christian higher education.
Abraham Kuyper, a leader of the nineteenth and twentieth century Dutch Reformed Church in The Netherlands, has had an outsized influence on Protestant Christian higher education in The United States even among universities that are not affiliated with the Calvinist tradition.
In fact, most of the universities I have been affiliated with are more Wesleyan than Calvinist, but the imprint of the reformed tradition on Christian higher education is remarkable.
The reformed tradition emphasizes the importance of developing a Christian worldview framed around the themes of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.
As a context for understanding our place in the world.
However, this context is not simply an intellectual framework.
As one reformed writer cautions, the Christian life is not just a matter of getting one's worldview straight.
The Christian life is characterized by sanctification expressed in daily conduct that shows the fruit of our core commitments and belongings.
While much of my thinking has been influenced by this intellectual tradition, I have also been influenced by sojourning with Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Mennonites, Quakers, Wesleyans, Baptists, Presbyterians, and a host of other Christian traditions.
In fact, I sometimes borrow Robert Roberts' ecclesiastical description.
I am denominationally promiscuous, at least in the best sense of the word.
The story of integration that I would like to discuss today does not begin with the evangelicals or reformed theologians.
The conversation begins much earlier in church history.
It begins with disagreements in the first centuries after Christ's life, death, and resurrection as the church grappled with how to reconcile apostolic teaching with teaching that came from non Christian philosophers.
Saint Augustine is, of course, one of the church fathers that influenced how the church interacted with the wisdom and the folly of non Christian philosophers.
But our story begins even earlier.
Excuse me.
I'm just getting over some laryngitis.
Nearly two hundred years before the birth of Saint Augustine, another influential or another influential early Christian theologian, Tertullian, was born.
Tertullian is best known for his rhetorical question, what indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
Tertullian prompted us to reflect on what Athens representing Greek philosophy had to do with Jerusalem representing Christian theology.
Dutch reforms philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff characterizes this as Tertullian's enduring question because it is a question with which we must continue to struggle.
What kind of dialogue should be held between the secular academy and the teachings of the church?
In my lecture notes, secular is written in quotation marks Because part of my assumption is that all knowledge is inextricably bound to God's grace, whether or would not we acknowledge that truth, and regardless of the religiosity or irreligiosity of those who discover truth.
So in one sense, there is no such thing as secular knowledge because all truth is sacred in its reflection of God's revelation.
Still, Tertullian's question remains.
For those of us in this room today, however, we might want to focus on a variation of that question.
What do Vienna and Leipzig have to do with Jerusalem?
Or perhaps today, we should specifically say, what does Vienna and Leipzig have to do with Rome?
But since I'm a Protestant, I think we'll stick with the metaphor of Jerusalem, the origin of the Christian faith.
While acknowledging that most of you in this room were approaching this question from the eyes of Jerusalem and from your specific Roman Catholic tradition.
So why might we refer in this talk to Vienna and Leipzig rather than Athens?
Vienna, of course, represents the emergence of modern psychotherapy.
Three major schools of psychotherapy emerged for Indiana in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds.
Freud's psychoanalysis, Adler's individual psychology, and Frunkle's logotherapy.
While these three psychotherapies do not encapsulate every therapeutic approach, they do represent emphasis that continue to be important to modern psychotherapy.
What is the nature of the unconscious mind and its relationship to psychopathology?
What roles do our individual assumptions about the nature of the world and our social context play in psychological and family adjustment?
What gives meaning to life?
And how do we face issues of existential anxiety and existential guilt of freedom and responsibility?
There are many theories of psychopathology and many models of psychotherapy, and Vienna stands as a metaphorical representation for these concerns.
Leipzig, on the other hand, is the place identified with modern empirical psychological science.
When Wilhelm Wundt established his psychological laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig, we embarked on the empirical study of human behavior.
Prior to this, psychology had been part of philosophy.
But when Voigt demonstrated that we could study many psychological phenomena using the scientific method, psychology largely shifted from being a metaphysical discipline to being a physical discipline.
Today, we have all kinds of quantitative and qualitative methods that Flint did not have, as well as complex neuroimaging techniques and the other ways of studying the brain and behavior.
But for our purposes, Leipzig can represent empirical psychology.
So what does Jerusalem have to do with Vienna and Leipzig?
How should Christians today think about the field of psychology in both its psychotherapeutic and its empirical expressions?
That is what I hope that we can address today.
To do so, however, we must recognize that we are entering a dialogue that precedes the emergence of modern psychology.
Long before Christians wondered how to engage the work of Freud and Phones, they were asking broader questions about how to engage secular learning in general.
Why was the relationship of Athens and Jerusalem a burning question for Tertullian?
Tertullian wanted to show that our allegiance is to the faith as revealed in Christ and in apostolic teaching.
Secular teaching can lead us astray.
Tertullian believed that the apostle Paul had singled out philosophy, the secular learning of Athens, as a threat to Christian faith.
If you have ever visited Mars Hill on the Acropolis in Athens, it is not hard to get this picture.
Everywhere you look, idols and temples compete for our affections, our attention, and our worship.
Yet even here, the apostle Paul saw an inroad for the gospel as he preached the famous Mars Hill sermon, beginning with a reference to an unknown god.
Paul bought brought Jerusalem to Athens.
A contemporary of Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, held a position that was quite different from that of Tertullian.
Clement believed that truth can be found through the grace given to all humankind by God.
In Clement's view, there was clearly truth in Greek philosophy because all that is true comes from God.
Thus, Christians could learn from Athenian philosophy, and philosophy could, in fact, pave the way for conversion.
In his words, philosophy, quote, was given to the Greeks as a covenant peculiar to them, being as it is, a stepping stone to the philosophy which is according to Christ.
By the time we get to Saint Augustine, we have a working arrangement where philosophy and theology exist in continuous dialogue.
In fact, the path to August Augustine's conversion ran through Cicero, a pagan philosopher from whom he learned that rhetoric was not principally about winning arguments.
It is about a means of seeking truth.
It remained, though, for Bishop Ambrose to introduce Augustine to truth with a capital t.
Following in Augustine's lineage, one cannot read Thomas Aquinas without recognizing that philosophy is useful in constructing theology.
The nineteenth century Christian existential philosopher, Nikolai Beriev, was even more explicit about the necessity of philosophy for theology.
In his view, quote, theology is not revelation.
It is a collective socially organized perceptual reaction to revelation that is organized along categories that are supplied by some form of philosophy.
Nonetheless, tensions still remain between Athens and Jerusalem.
Pope John Paul the second alluded to the tensions between Athens and Jerusalem, though not by name, in a papal encyclical addressed to Catholic universities.
Quoting himself, John Paul the second said, a Catholic university's privileged task is to unite existentially by intellectual effort to orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical.
The search for truth and the certainty of already knowing the felt of truth.
John Paul the second reminds us that we are extending a dialogue that stretches back from Tertullian, Clement, Augustine, Aquinas, and theologians throughout the past two thousand years to address contemporary issues.
As Christians who are engaged in psychology, whether clinical psychology as represented by Vienna or any of the academic subfields of psychology represented by Leipzig, we need to ask ourselves how our faith is lived out in our professions.
In my textbook on integration, I essentially look at six possible ways that we can answer this question.
First, there are those who see Christianity and psychology as moral enemies.
John Paul the second remarks on the commonality of this approach in the quotation that I just mentioned.
Some people see sacred and secular learning in opposition to one another.
In the Protestant tradition, this is a view commonly found among Christians from fundamentalist backgrounds.
One influential Protestant preacher who died this past year put it bluntly.
In his view, the psychiatrist has usurped the work of the physician, but mostly the work of the preacher.
And he engages in this work without warrant from God, without the aid of the scriptures, and without regard to the Holy Spirit.
Thus, he seeks to change the behavior and values of people in an ungodly manner.
In so far as he succeeds, the results may be feared.
The work of changing men's lives belongs to the Christian ministry in particular and to Christian people in general, not to some self appointed cast of humanistic priests that has moved into the church's territory.
Never fighting words.
Another contemporary pastor put it this way.
The rush to embrace psychology within the church is frankly mystifying.
Psychology and Christianity have been enemies since the beginning.
He further asserted that only the Christian can study the soul.
Only the Christian can see our deepest spiritual needs.
In his view, relying on secular psychology is denying what he calls the sufficiency of Christ to meet our needs.
Such individuals are in part reacting to hostility towards religion by secular psychologists and to an ardent defense of their view of the faith.
They follow what I call the enemy's moral.
While I believe that there's a great deal to critique in this view, including a gross misunderstanding of psychology and some questionable theological assumptions, I think one can be gracious in seeing some elements of Tertullian's view in the approach.
They fear that psychology can lead people astray.
They fear that pastors can lose their proper place in the confessional.
They fear that the church can lose its moral authority in dealing with deep questions of how we should live, of our origins, and of our tell us.
They perceive that we might exchange sanctification for self realization and self aggrandizement.
And much as I disagree with your overall model, I believe that in these points, they are right.
There are dangers, and we ignore these dangers to our peril.
But I do not think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
A second way of engaging psychology and religion is to simply be interested in the potential benefits of religious belief or for that matter, just studying why people hold one religious belief for another or no religious belief at all.
I call this the spies model.
This is not meant to be a disparaging title.
I'm sure that in our day to day lives, we have all learned a lot by eavesdropping on conversations, investigating opportunities, doing due diligence, and inspecting opportunities.
We can learn a lot about religious life without being religious.
William James offers many penetrating insights into religious experience in his classic work, the varieties of religious experience.
The psychology of religion is a venerable and useful approach to understanding religiosity.
While the enemies model was found mostly among fundamentalists in the Protestant tradition, this model was more commonly found among those from liberal religious backgrounds and it is the approach that is taken in the psychology of religion.
It is fascinating to think about the psychological factors that influence psychological belief.
After all, grace is perfected in nature as Thomas Aquinas told us.
We are not disembodied souls or individuals devoid of personal experiences and culture.
There is a lot of value in studying things like positive and negative religious scoping and many other religious phenomena.
But a problem in this way of thinking about psychology and religion is that it tends towards reductionism.
If by studying Christian faith and practice as an object, you remove the reality of sin and salvation and sanctification as genuine existential concerns, you have lost the essence of religious experience and religious faith.
Moreover, if we see religion as valuable only for its tangible benefits, we have fallen into what sociologist Chris Smith calls moralistic therapeutic theism.
So, again, there are benefits in this model, but there are problems as well.
A third approach for relating psychology and Christianity is what I call the colonialist model.
People who follow this model want to preserve orthodoxy.
They see in psychology certain benefits that they are willing to borrow, but without deeply engaging the discipline of psychology.
Pop psychology can make interesting sermon, illustrations after all.
But these people never really get around to reading psychological journal articles.
Again, there are good things in this model.
They see value in orthodoxy.
They see value in psychology.
But rather than engaging the field with diligence and deep Christian thought, they are content to plunder the Egyptians and keep psychology at a safe distance.
So that brings us to a fourth model, which I call the neutral parties model.
There are those who think that psychology and Christianity are both fine things to engage in, but they need to be kept in their own corners.
When in Rome do as the Romans, and so in Athens or Jerusalem or Leipzig or Vienna.
Their concern is that we do not contaminate our sign objective scientific psychology with Christian presuppositions and that we do not reduce our faith to a psychological phenomena.
This model is common among psychologists who were trained with a modernist conception of science and who engage in research.
The two most prominent figures here would be Malcolm Jeeves, who studied cognitive psychology and neuropsychology, and David Myers, a social psychologist.
I have enormous respect for these two men.
They are deeply committed Christians, and they are first rate scholars.
But I am not convinced that the modernist conception of scientific objective objectivity is at all possible or even desirable.
We all begin with certain assumptions that are foundational.
Metaphysical assumptions are not generally available to empirical scrutiny.
I do not go to Athens as a blank slate.
I go there as someone who is already committed to the city of God.
As such, that will introduce into the equation what Nicholas Woltersdorf calls control beliefs and which I believe are at least partly expressed in a Christian worldview, which we will discuss later.
The supposed commitment to objectivity in this model seems to me to be a mirage, and I do not think that the attempt to segregate faith from psychology is either possible or desirable except to the degree the unique methods of each discipline are clearly confined to their respective concerns.
In other words, one uses rationality and empiricism in psychology, and one uses rationality and hermeneutics in doing theology.
I describe a fifth model, which is characteristic of those who think that psychology is redeemable, but only by creating an entirely new type of psychology built on Christian foundations and drawing heavily on scripture and wisdom drawn from Christian tradition.
Eric Johnson is the person who is most associated with this approach, and I think that it has much value.
The Society for Christian Psychology, which Eric founded, exists to promote the development of a distinctly Christian psychology.
This model is extremely valuable in that it takes Christian scripture and Christian tradition seriously, and it desires to engage in dialogue with modern psychology.
In practice, however, this is primarily a counseling approach, and I am not convinced that it works well as a way of engaging all of psychology.
Finally, there is a sixth model, which I call allies as subjects of one sovereign.
This approach is held by people who think their robust dialogue can be held between Christian faith and secular, again in quotation marks, psychology.
Like Clement, people who follow this model see the so called secular disciplines as means through which God's grace allows us to learn about God's world.
But it also takes seriously Tertullian's concern that the assumptions held in Athens can be wrong and can lead us astray.
This model acknowledges and even celebrates the fact that Jerusalem or Rome, in your case, makes serious demands on what we believe.
It grounds our understanding in a sacred framework which begins not with us, but with the God who created us, who formed us with dust.
We are also given a unique role in creation.
In fact, we participate with God in the unfolding of creation to the degree that we worship God, form societies based on justice, tend to the garden by learning about and caring for the created world, and participate in God's redemptive work as we strive to bring peace, reconciliation, and shalom to the brokenness of the lives of ourselves and our relationships.
Unless we understand that we are created by God and for God, we are utterly lost.
We are, as Mary Stewart Van Lewin said, characters in search of an author.
Or as Pope Benedict said, without God, man neither knows which way to go nor even understands who he is.
The controlled beliefs, which I mentioned earlier, are at least partly reflected in a reformed evangelical view of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.
These concepts are not unique to the reform perspective, and they can also be found in other Christian traditions.
And they're certainly evident in Augustine's thinking.
To the degree that we air in understanding these concepts, we will misunderstand who we are.
While these concepts come from Jerusalem, note that they are formed through logical categories.
As my college professor or, philosophy professor argued, systematic theology requires philosophical prolegomena.
Clear thinking is learned in Athens.
And as Saint Thomas Aquinas demonstrates, clear thinking is invaluable in constructing theology.
For the purposes of understanding human behavior and treating interpersonal and intrapersonal problems, we must go further though, the theology alone.
We can also learn by exploring human beings through philosophical and scientific categories.
Jerusalem teaches us who we are in the context of God's unfolding story.
Vienna can help us understand things about human brokenness that we cannot learn from Jerusalem.
And Leipzig may help us learn things about human neurology that we do not find in the pages of holy scripture.
I think that each of these six models that I described embody a way of trying to answer enduring question.
I think that each of these models has important things to teach us.
I do not, however, think that each of these models are of equal quality, which is why I embrace the sixth approach to integrating psychology and Christianity.
I think we can also gain some insight from Flannery O'Connor in her reflections on being a Christian writer.
In an essay about writing, O'Connor Flannery O'Connor asserted that writers must deal with reality, and then an honest author must begin with deformed characters.
I think that this is true for us as Christian psychologists as well.
Our subject matter as human beings made in the very image of God placed in a world full of blessings, but our subjects and the world they inhabit are also broken.
Not irredeemably broken, but broken nonetheless.
O'Connor goes on to say that Christian belief shapes what we see, how we write, and how we live.
I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer.
I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy.
This means that for me, the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ.
And what I see in the world, I see in relation to that.
I don't think this is a position that can be taken halfway.
Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live.
And for the last few centuries, there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.
Christians who study psychology in any of its subdisciplines are confronted with the same tension between creation and fall, between the fallen beings that we are and the redemption of all things in Christ in the now and the not yet of history.
We must constantly hold intention that we are created in the image of God and follow.
It is said that a Polish rabbi from the eighteen hundreds instructed people to carry two pieces of paper, one in each pocket.
The paper in one pocket says, for my sake was the world created, while the other says, I am but dust and ashes.
The two pieces of paper emphasize our divine origin and our finitude.
To this, we must add that we are not just finite, we are following.
When we emphasize the Imago Dei at the expense of the fact that we are finite and following or vice versa, we end up with a distorted view of who we are.
Just as in the Roman Catholic view, a reformed evangelical view holds these truths intention.
Allow me to illustrate part of the story of how I embrace the reformed evangelical approach to integration.
As an undergraduate at a Christian college, sitting in a theories of personality class, I remember confronting a contradiction between my theological belief in human depravity and the psychological view of human goodness.
In the class, we were studying Carl Rogers' concept of the organismic valuing process.
Raised in the Presbyterian church, Rogers somehow managed to reject the idea of total depravity and replace it with a view of autonomous and innate good.
To be fair, the Christian historian would tell us that this view of human potential wasn't original to Rogers.
It emerged over hundreds of years flowing from the enlightenment into the modern era.
Rogers was, of course, a product of his time, but he also shaped the direction of psychology for decades to come.
It still surprises me how many of my students walk away enamored with Rogers.
But then what's not to like?
The mantra of our day is, I'm okay, and you're okay.
Let me just be who I am.
What's not to like?
It's a lie.
I am not okay, and you are not okay.
And god forbid that you should leave me as I am.
But it is such an appealing lie.
I think perhaps that it was in studying Rogers that I first began to form my nascent ideas about integration.
Certainly, I could critique Rogers to a theological viewpoint, but I can also see that his conception of humankind was truncated rather than completely wrong.
We are made a little lower than the angels.
We are made in the very image of god, but we are also fallen in sin, self deceived, and deceivers of others.
Some of my inner pulse inner impulses are good and godly.
Some of them are corrupt and evil.
Yet it is not good enough to critique Rogers theologically.
For the psychologist, the research mantra is clear.
Show me the data.
And what did the data tell us?
That some of our impulses aren't good, though the secular psychologists wouldn't use the word godly.
And some of our impulses are what?
Prejudiced, self serving, biased, shaped by cognitive distortions and faulty learning histories and unconscious impulses.
True.
The psychologist will not likely use the word sinful, but the message is clear that Rogers gives us only part of the picture.
Few clinical psychologists challenged this view, although Carl Menninger had the temerity to ask the question, whatever became of sin?
And Paul Vitz pointed out that psychology easily morphs into self worship.
Let me share a story of a student who is recently struggling through these issues in one of my classes.
In my integration class, each of my students is asked to write an extensive paper in which they reflect on their own emerging views of the relationship of religion and psychology.
For nonreligious students, I expect that they will think about what religion might provide as a source of human wisdom and folly.
And I want to see them grapple with the implications of positive and negative religious coping.
Even if they do not consider themselves to be religious people, they need to recognize that religion is an important framework for how many people understand the world and how they attempt to live their lives.
For Christian students, however, I want them to grapple with the issues that we have been discussing.
I tell them that I want them to be honest in their papers.
I do not want them to just regurgitate what I believe, and I encourage them to come up with their own models.
This past year, a student did come up with her own model.
She desperately wanted to keep psychology and religion segregated.
Rather than adapt adopt the neutral party's model, though, her idea was that there are two different trains and two railroad tracks that deliver goods to a station.
If a religious need is found, you call for the religious train.
If a need is psychological, you call for the psychology train.
I found myself thinking about her model for days after reading her paper.
It's supposed to be on a blank screen.
Oh.
Where was it?
A trade.
I found myself thinking about her model for days after reading her paper.
In attempting to keep psychology and religion separate, all she really did was change the nature of questions, but she hadn't noticed this.
Who decides if the need is religious or psychological?
Who creates the goods that are delivered by each train system?
Who inspects the contents to see if the goods are fresh or spoiled, healthy or unhealthy, who calls for the theology passenger train or the psychoanalytic express.
I have a great deal of sympathy for this student's desire to segregate religion and psychology, and I can imagine a million reasons why this might seem to be a congenial solution to Tertullian's enduring question.
But I don't think it works, Or at least I don't think it works if Jerusalem represents something closer to Augustine's city of God.
If God reigns over both Athens and Jerusalem, then we cannot simply segregate them from each other or eliminate one or the other.
Christians may disagree on how Athens or Vienna or Leipzig relates to Jerusalem, but I do not think we can put them in hermetically sealed containers carefully cordoned off from one another.
I may disagree with how other Christians attempt to relate Athens and Jerusalem, but I respect that each approach raises important issues that we need to take seriously.
Christian philosopher, Nicholas Woltersdorf, contends that Tertullian's question is the enduring question for the Christian academic.
What does the Christian gospel have to do with the enterprise of scholarship, in particular with the scholarship of those who are not Christian?
Walter Storff points out that Tertullian's question would not have endured if the church had settled on an answer, but it has not.
Likewise, in our day, there is not universal agreement on how we as Christians should think about psychology or any other academic discipline.
This means that we will have intramural squabbles about how to answer the question.
It means that we will need to have humility and to search for nuggets of truth in those views with which we disagree even as we disagree strongly, but hopefully with charity.
Where Tertullian sees opposition between the church and pagan philosophy, Clement of Alexandria sees pagan philosophy as a gift from God insofar as it teaches and leads to truth without, of course, sanctioning all of what was taught by pagan philosophy.
Despite their differences though, Tertullian and Clement can both instruct us.
Tertullian warns us of the dangers of being seduced into a secular worldview.
Clement celebrates the good gifts of God wherever they may be found.
Augustine and Aquinas demonstrate how deep philosophical reflections and theology inform and enrich each other.
The issues that we deal with today may be new, but they coalesce in patterns that are forerunners in the faith dealt with centuries ago.
C.
Stephen Evans, another Christian philosopher who is interested in, psychology and, Christian integration, suggests that there will be a diversity of approaches to integration.
He makes two assertions.
The project of integrating Christianity into psychology is itself pluralistic.
Different Christians who may be equally faithful to their Christian colleagues may disagree about the implications of Christian faith for various issues in psychology.
Nonetheless, faithful Christians can hope to find common ground in mere Christianity to constitute a genuine community that can make progress.
Here, he's using CS Lewis's, term mere Christianity as the core of what we all believe.
It is at this point that I would like to end by commenting on a particular advantage that Catholic thinkers have compared to Protestant thinkers when it comes to integration.
The first book on faith learning integration that I read was a small tone by two men who would later be my professors, Bruce Naramore and John Carter.
When I first read their book on integration, I remember finishing it and thinking that something was missing.
After reflecting on this for years, I think part of what was missing was a solid sense of a theological beginning point.
This came into even sharper focus as a result of reading the book, which the faculty of Divine Mercy put together.
Allow me to quote from an email that I wrote to doctor Vitz, which illustrates this observation.
I have been working my way through a Catholic Christian mental model, and I would like to thank you and your colleagues for writing a much needed resource for integration, not just for Catholics, but for Christians in other traditions as well.
I was especially struck by your insight about the difficulty of identifying mere Christianity and of the difficulty of defining this concept and the limits it creates for Protestant integration.
As a graduate student in the eighties, I sensed this problem when I read Carter and Ermore's text on integration, and I immediately recognized that their little book was missing a core framework that could define what Christianity is.
This trend has only accelerated over the years even in evangelical circles.
I tried to create some basic frameworks to define the core mere Christianity in my integration text.
But in so doing, I recognized that many who call themselves Christian are outside of this framework.
I believe that you are quite correct that Catholics have an advantage here that the catechism and the teachings of the church make your own framework a given.
To return to ex cordia ecclesia, on John Paul the second drawing on Titus the sixth provided a rough map for Catholics to follow as they travel this space between Athens and Jerusalem.
Through its universities, he said, the church explores the mysteries of humanity in the world, clarifying them in the light of revelation.
Athens can benefit Jerusalem.
And sometimes, as with Augustine, it can even prepare the way for Jerusalem.
But Athens is only seen in its fullness in the light of Jerusalem.
While I follow a reformed evangelical approach to integration, I also see value in other approaches, including the one expressed in your own Catholic Christian meta model.
I have an appreciation for what I have come to call tradition saturated integration.
I have learned much from Christians who come from Roman Catholic, reformed, Mennonite, Pentecostal, Wesleyan, Quaker, Presbyterian, and other traditions.
Walter Storff issues a challenge that is quite appropriate to our concerns as we draw this lecture to a close.
The question which you and I as Christian scholars and intellectuals can never be finished with pondering is how to speak and act with Christian integrity within the practice of our common humanity, which is scholarship and learning.
We do not or should not go off into our own order to think.
We participate in the common in the practice of our common humanity, but we are not under the illusion that it's possible to participate in that practice as generic human beings.
Accordingly, we struggle to participate there with Christian integrity.
I hope that this lecture has helped us to think about the enduring questions that confront us today when we Christians consider how to engage the discipline of psychology and how to be faithful practitioners, scholars, and researchers.
We are engaging in new, very old questions.
Tertullian reminds us that our deepest needs are found through the church and that rival world views are seductive.
Clement reminds us that there is great freedom to explore the common grace which is distributed throughout the academy.
In his words, the way of truth is one, but into it, as into a perennial river, streams flow from all sides.
I would contend the truth flows not just from Jerusalem, but also from Athens, and not just from Athens, but also from Vienna and Leipzig and from many other streams.
The task before us as scholars and practitioners of psychology who are committed Christians is to continue pondering our own version of Tertullian's question.
What do Vienna and Leipzig have to do with Jerusalem?
It is our task to speak and act with Christian integrity in the marketplace of ideas and in the sanctity of the therapist's office.
May God grant us the humility to combat the pride that is often the besetting state of academia.
May he develop within us those virtues that allow us to dialogue with each other charitably.
And may he grant us grace to approach this task wisely in order that by doing so, we can better love God with all of our hearts, souls, mind, and strength, and that we may better love our neighbors as ourselves.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate that, doctor Entwistle.
And, delighted now to invite, doctor Paul Bitz.
Many of you know, but a senior scholar here at DMU, and his teaching is research focused on the integration of Christian theology, especially class Catholic anthropology with psychology, and along with doctor Nordling, the tall one, and, doctor Craig, Stephen Titus, they have been the editors of the book that doctor Anne Twistle mentioned, a Catholic Christian Meta Model of the Person, integration of psychology and mental health practice.
Doctor Nordling is one of the founding faculty members of EMU, licensed psychologist who's, has specialized credentials in child, marriage, and family therapy and teaches both basic and advanced coursework in these areas in the PsyD program and is also an active scholar.
And, we're just delighted that both of you can be with us tonight to interact with doctor Entwistle's, presentation, and the floor belongs to the three of you now.
Well, first, I'd like to say what a wonderful talk that was.
What a wonderful, summary of Ted Whistle's understanding, which is extraordinarily scholar scholarly, fair, and really clearly thought out, covering the field in a way that I think is is quite remarkable.
So you can all put yourself in one of those or in some group of those approaches.
It got six to choose from and understand other people better by coming by seeing them as part of one of those.
And it's a it's a it's actually a a tour de force that you saw here covering, psychology the modern psychology since, well, let's say 1879 and our friend, Bill Helm.
So, I just like to say that to begin with because I found it really extraordinarily refreshing and, informative.
Thank you.
And I'd also like to say that I take it that you believe we're in the same camp out of the six camps.
And I have to say that it's very consoling around the campfire.
I had to have to look over and see that you're there.
Although I do like the fact that I I would imagine you're gonna be across the fire because, one thing you've created the uncordonable since for an academic.
One, no academic likes to encounter someone who, first of all, is brighter than them, writes better than them, and is nicer than them.
Two of those are are tolerable.
One of those is intolerable.
But in your case, I I consider you or all three of those things.
My wife is here.
She may disagree.
So Well, I'd like to just raise a few questions that were brought up by the questions we were supposed to, address and just mention them for all of us to hear.
One of the important ones was, how are we going to keep the faith alive and clear in the continued development of integration?
That is the history of Christian intellectual systems, whether they were universities or colleges or seminaries or what have you.
The history, at least in the modern period, and perhaps at other times as well in history, but certainly in the modern world, The history has been the slow dilution of of the faith.
And, I don't know how we can begin to address responding to that in advance.
What can we might what what might be done to, slow or hopefully even to stop such a a a dilution, which seems somehow or other to always go with growth and success and so forth.
So do what would you say we should do?
Here look.
We're here at DMU.
We're in the early stages.
We hope it works out and becomes successful.
But, you know, success can be a a very mixed blessing in terms of the faith.
So, David, you know, what do we do to if if if there are things to block this potential?
I think one of the things we need to do is quite simply just keep our eye on the ball.
You know?
What is it that is our goal?
As we talked about this, in a Zoom meeting before we got here, one of the things that we had talked about briefly was the original, what's it called?
The Catholic Association of Psychologists, I think, which eventually became division thirty six.
Right?
Yeah.
Psychologists interested in psychological issues.
And you can sort of see this drift from we want to be intentional Catholics in the field to we wanna be acceptable to the field.
And and that's a dangerous and very easy drift to make.
Perhaps the scripture reading for today at mass, Jesus said he didn't come to bring peace.
He came to bring division.
And what we have to be recognizing from the beginning then is that division is intrinsic to being a Christian.
Division without he said he's gonna put some father and son against each other, mother and daughter, daughter-in-law and and mother-in-law.
He didn't come to bring everybody gonna be all on the same page.
Now we have to deal with that as an issue, but we must recognize that division and with it even persecution is a spiritual grace or certainly can be.
And once we've gotten rid of it all, we've probably diluted ourselves into the, into the non non Christian world.
We have to keep and that means keeping Jesus at the center because I would say the highest form of ecumenicalism there are two kinds of ecumenicalism.
One is to find the lowest common denominator you all have in common.
And they tried that for a while.
I don't think it worked very well.
And the other is to find the highest common denominator that you all have in common.
And that's that Jesus Christ is the answer to to our lives and to the source of our salvation.
And I thought those first four principles that you gave in the first slide Wonderful.
I don't know if that's mere Christianity.
I'm not sure.
But I I found myself hey.
I'm an evangelical.
Of course, I believe other things too, but I think that but those things but there there's the core that we have to keep in mind.
We have to keep in mind if we're gonna keep the faith in our intellectual life and year of dealing with.
Yeah.
I had a a couple of things to that.
And I know it's it's a big concern that when we enter into dialogue with, you know, secular the secular world, that there's a tendency to, not be grounded and to very quickly, find ourselves, giving up principles that are that are not gonna allow us to be authentic and to really be faithful to what our real mission is.
And so I I would identify three things that I think are, very just imperative.
One is we can we can reduce things to look at them, but we can never bracket God.
We can't bracket god away.
And the second is that we have an image of the person, and it's most simple the most simple way of saying it is that Jesus is the is the model of a perfect human being.
And so when we enter into dialogue, we can never give anything away that would somehow betray what the perfect human being would be.
And I think the third is that, we've always got to be a full person in dialogue.
Some of the kinds of ways that, you know, have been we've described our ways of doing psychotherapy is that we put ourselves in service to our clients, and that's true.
But we put ourselves as a person in service of our clients.
We don't become our client and then lend our wisdom, you know, simply as being a substitute for our client.
And so I I think we've always got to engage as a full person.
We have our own conscience.
We have our own identity.
And that's all that's what's part of being an interpersonal relationship, and we can't give that up.
We can't be chameleons that leave our values completely to the side, and we can't leave our identities to the side.
Now with that said, we also can't do things that are unduly influencing of our clients or somehow, essentially, expect our clients to become us either.
And so, those are the things that I I think are, really important.
Another thing I think is important in maintaining our, our identity is when we dialogue with other people, that we dialogue with them where there's at least some basic agreement at a worldview level.
And sometimes within this kind of cancel culture, type, there's an attempt to to pull out the things we don't disagree and immediately discard us as Christians.
And so I think we have to look for, commonalities, between us and others.
For example, when we wanna discuss a case, perhaps we need to discuss a case of a couple that used to love each other and now they're distressed.
And the children are suffering.
What are we gonna do about that?
And then we can have views that bring in, our Christian vision of the, you know, sanctity of marriage or the Christian vision of the faithfulness of marriage or the Christian vision of the unity within marriage.
Some things that may not be part of of the world view of the person we're talking with.
But what they will see is that we all come up with ways of trying to preserve that marriage, bring love back, and help that poor child that's somehow caught in the middle.
And so I think we've got to also pick the way the kinds of ways that we dialogue because if we begin with things that where immediately it triggers, triggers intense, reactions, I don't I don't think that that's the wisest way of of going with things.
If I can add one more thing.
In my class on integration, towards the beginning of the semester, I have my students read, Alan Bergen's 1980 article on, I can't remember the name of it, second, Religion and psychotherapy.
What is some Yeah.
Something I get.
Some variation on Yeah.
Basically, what he does is compare and contrast clinical and humanistic values to Christian values Yes.
Or religious values.
And this is a pioneering article because somebody said, hey.
Religious values are being excluded in the field.
And then I asked my students, why was Alan Bergen the one to write that article?
And there's really two reasons.
Number one, he had credibility in the field because he was a big name who had done big research.
So they were gonna listen because he had credibility.
But there was a second reason, and my students don't get this at first.
And I say, look at the little fine notes in the article.
Where was he a professor?
And they go, Brigham Young.
You know?
Well, what's that got to do with anything?
If you are used to being a persecuted minority religious group, you've got each other's back.
You're used to getting face the your the door slammed in your face.
If we're going to survive, we have to have each other's back.
Yes.
We need to encourage each other in what we're doing.
And I think Bergen's a great model for us in that.
I I knew him in graduate school.
Really?
Yes.
It was a year ahead of me.
And I also knew he was born Mhmm.
Which is just as interesting to me, and I was at that time an atheist.
So, you know, I didn't get palsy.
So, doctor Bitz, I think, one thing that we've had conversations about it and is where what are the kinda next steps in integration?
Now it's what are the next steps?
We've we've got theoretical models, and we're developing those, but, you know, there's always more.
So what what do you see is kinda Okay.
I see three basic real opportunities that is way ways to find out something new that'll be both helpful and, you know, help you professionally.
One is to look at aspects of our model that weren't addressed, but that are important.
And here are two of them.
First of all, I don't think we dealt with the unconscious adequately or with enough specificity.
So what is needed is some way to, talk about what is the meaning of the unconscious within our understanding of the person.
It's not naturally found in in, most Christian writing.
Although, as I mentioned to somebody once, the Saint Paul did for he was the first unconscious psychologist when he said, why is it I I I don't do what I want to do, and I do do what I don't wanna do?
He was sort of getting at it right there.
So I think one area is to explore the unconscious.
And this will have a lot to do with, not just, neo psychoanalytic approaches, but it'll probably connect up with some of the work on on on brain psychology, as well.
But the whole meaning of the unconscious mind and its implications for our understanding of the person within a Christian framework.
Even it it would even within a philosophical framework, it hasn't really been a handle, I don't think.
But in any case, we would do it from a Christian and philosophical and a psychological point of view and bring it in, but that hasn't been addressed.
The second, area that needs to be be addressed is the connection of the person within we're talking about the model of the person.
And how does how is the person connected to, if you will, the spiritual life in a negative sense?
That is, how do we connect, to the demons who run around the world seeking the ruin of souls?
That's a very important issue.
I'm not talking about, you know, full possession or something like that, which is, of course, quite rare.
But it's quite likely that many psychological problems have a spiritual problem with them that they have a it's a kind of comorbidity.
Comorbid.
You know, you they had the problem with obsessiveness, but they also have some other spiritual issue there.
Like, that may show up in, you know, they walk around.
They go to confession, and they walk around the block, and they come back, and they have to confess again because they think they've sinned.
I I don't know.
This is I I have no expertise here, but the negative spiritual life ranging from, you know, the lower levels, which I think are relatively calm.
Somebody might say that all serious psychopathology has with it some low level spiritual upset spiritual pathology as well.
That may be extreme.
But we need to understand that and probably find ways to, if possible, measure for it.
That is to find out what kinds of responses tend to show up in persons who are obsessed.
Not possessed, but obsessed in some way or in other ways or have involved their psychological issues with, with, essentially, demonic issues.
And that's come the importance for that is not just because it's always been around, and Jesus talks about it a lot.
There are reasons to think the at the at the spiritual negative spiritual attributes are suddenly becoming more common.
And we're finding, you know, the satanic church says that abortion is one of their their spiritual rituals, and to be opposed to abortion is to violate their freedom of religion.
Okay.
We got when when we reach that point in the society, things have grown that we need to have some way to address.
I can't I can't help you much but to say, hey.
Here's a problem.
And some of you might feel called to it, Dennis.
The relationship of the model of the person to this spirit negative spiritual realm.
And then I have a third suggestion for something you can do.
That'd be really very helpful.
Also, we need case histories in which the characteristics of the model were integrated into the the therapeutic description so you could see how it made a difference.
So you'd say, alright.
So here's this person with their their particular marital problem.
Here's this person with depression.
Here's this person with anxiety, and so forth.
What what could be brought in here that the model would imply should be brought in or might be relevant?
And, of course, the good clinician is always an artist, not a scientist in this they're an artist.
Their intuition tells them that this will work for this person in this situation.
Artistic knowledge is also knowledge.
Just isn't scientific knowledge.
We have to be willing to admit that you can have an intuition that's based on clinical experience that's true.
Another way of putting it very simply is before the invention of modern psychology, indeed, before the invention of modern science, there was a lot of true knowledge in the world before science existed.
Keep that in mind.
It isn't only science that can give us knowledge.
But case histories that show examples of a good way in which, well, this should be that we ought to have them now, how forgiveness can be, introduced.
But how maybe you might introduce the virtue of courage to deal with somebody's anxiety or the virtue of gratitude to deal with somebody's depression or how you might, address the understanding of their own sinfulness so that they suddenly realize that this other person, you know, isn't all bad either.
I don't know.
You know?
There are a lot of different ways this might happen.
Like, suddenly, you describe you you try to bring in the notion of the person's vocation.
Many therapists don't ever bring that in.
What is the person's vocation?
And we have in the model three different kinds of vocation that everyone is called to.
Your personal code vocation to for us as Christians, which is sanctity and, you know, redemption and spiritual life.
But even in to the atheist, it's probably to some kind of flourishing, and you wanna bring that to their attention.
And then there's the what is your calling in life?
Typical as you call the married life or the single life.
There's now some nice writing done on the single life as a vocation.
I mean, the adult single life.
We'll all be single various times in our lives.
We were born single.
We'll probably die single.
Not necessarily, but your spouse can die, and then you're back to single again.
But, anyway, so the vocation of state of marriage and then the your your vocation to your job or your professional contribution to society.
And those are ignored, so you might find special ways, certain and maybe there are even certain mental pathologies where some of these are more relevant, just like courage might be more relevant for people with anxiety and gratitude for people who are suffering from depression.
Maybe these vocations are there for people with identity problems.
I I don't know.
You're you're gonna be the clinicians.
You're gonna be the artists who will who will be able to detect when some of these things are a fit.
And, of course, you'll detect when they're not a fit by finding out it doesn't work a lot of times too.
But that's how your experience grows.
Eventually, you've you you learn x, y, and z don't work, so I'll try a and b or something like that.
But, anyway, those are the three things that I think offhand, we have a big opportunities to to develop new aspects of the model that have been ignored, applications of of clinical case histories, and the whole area of of this of the negative spiritual life.
Doctor Wessel?
If you look at the psychology Christianity integration literature over the last thirty to forty years, we've done a lot with sort of models of how to do this.
We've done a lot with, you know, specific clinical issues and in recent years, more on specific, religious interventions.
What we haven't done a whole lot of is the rest of psychology.
We've done a lot with Vienna.
We haven't done a whole lot with This is Leipzig.
And if you look at every any intro to psych textbook, Vienna's two chapters.
Leipzig is 11.
So, you know, industrial and organizational psychology, neuropsychology, developmental psychology, there is so much more.
And I think because, you know, clinical issues bring us face to face with lots of existential and religious issues, it's kind of a natural fit.
And there's, of course, a lot more clinical psychologists than other things.
But there's a whole lot of the rest of the field that we've just barely scratched.
Reaction time.
Yeah.
So so Yeah.
You've you've you've talked about the, you you know, the fact that the the basic sciences have been kind of ignored in the sense that there's a whole new way to look at social psychology.
You know?
One one of the, chapters in the book looks at the bystander, And it's a very individualistic perspective, and it doesn't look at an interpersonal reason a personal explanation for the bystander or even a communal one in the way that that a Christian would look at it.
And so like, that's, you know, intriguing areas, for development.
Quickly, I would say from my perspective, one of the challenges that we have with, a Christian view of the person is although it's very rich, it's often hard to take a view of the person and then put it into actual clinical practice.
And the two areas that I think allow people to, in a concrete way, understand what the meta model is is or any meta model, any broader vision of the person, is the development, I think, of an intake interview that almost holds our hand so that we make sure we ask about the right things.
Because I I I know from experiences that, often what happens is people read a book like yours or ours.
And when they go to try to apply it, they kind of do what they've always done.
They either use a DSM five structured interview or they do, they use some type of a therapeutic model as a way.
In other words, if I'm doing cognitive therapy, I'm gonna ask about antecedent events and your reactions and what were the intervening thoughts.
But that's very reductionistic.
And so, my sense is we need to get the big picture.
What is this person's virtue strengths?
What is this first person's beliefs?
Strongly held beliefs.
What is what are what are their relationships like?
We need to get all of that before we intervene.
And I don't think that either the interview or a therapeutic model alone, that will guide to capture what we've always seen in a Christian perspective or what is the fullness of the person.
So I think, we need to develop, more of a structured interview that make sure that we get the big picture before we actually start with our work.
And the second the second area, I think, that kinda guides clinicians in their daily work are really, books on how to apply ethics and applied ethical reason.
And, we have ethical principles, but at least certainly within the Catholic world, we we currently don't have books that take case histories and say, what how does a based on our vision of the person, how does a Catholic Christian or Christian in general look at this area?
Because if our really, what what it what are codes of that?
They they tell us they imply that we owe something to the client, and they imply that there's a reason for that.
Well, the reason, within secular perspective is very different.
You know, the reason we owe our clients, you know, a great deal as as Christians is because they're made in image and likeness of God.
They're made uniquely by God with a specific purpose.
But that's a different motivation.
That's a different reason for why we are doing our work, and yet our ethics codes are great.
I mean, they're they help us to not do the wrong things, and they give us some guidance about the right things.
But a Christian ethos, I think, is a higher standard.
We need to have, Christian books that that look at ethical cases and apply them.
Them.
I think that would be very valuable.
Thank you very much, panel.
I'm clapping for the other two.
Thank you again, doctor Entwistle, for your informative and insightful, lecture for us.
I wanna let you all know that we do have refreshments in the, if you go out to the left and then go straight back, there's refreshments, time to meet the presenter and our discussion, panel.
Again, thank you so much for coming and being with us tonight.