Dear Friends,

Too many of us are taking our sin problem to psychologists, and getting lost along the way. It’s time to come back home.

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Mythologizing the Resurrection

While I was recently browsing my borrowed copy of The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith (1), by C. Stephen Evans, the topic of mythologizing the Resurrection caught my eye. In short, to mythologize the Resurrection is to see it as “just another mythical expression of a universal truth” (page 74). In turn, the factual nature of the Resurrection is either rejected, or seen as beyond the reach of rational inquiry.

So, why do we keep mythologizing the Resurrection?

These are the reasons he suggests (and he gives details on each one, but we’ll focus on #3):

1. The appeal of optimistic anthropology
2. The abolition of authority
3. The psychologizing of culture
4. The embracement of ‘pluralism’
5. The appeal of the East

The psychologizing of culture

Here are Evans’s comments (emphasis mine) from this section (page 75):

“It is characteristic of the advocates of mythologization today to make psychology the mouthpiece of metaphysics. The appeal of this is multifold. First, it fits with the general psychologization of Western culture, and the emphasis on the satisfaction of individual needs. Every problem becomes a psychological problem, and psychological problems are in turn laden with metaphysical depth: ‘Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness.’ (Campbell). The therapist becomes the new high priest, the transmitter of sacred truth and mediator of healing insight. the new religion is virtually guaranteed to respond to my felt psychological needs. ‘In the office of the modern psychoanalyst, the stages of the hero-adventure come to light again in the dreams and hallucinations of the patient’. Of course, this psychologizing  of ultimate truth fits well with the rejection of authority and optimistic anthropology mentioned above. My own psyche becomes the source of final truth.”

Since Jesus is supposed to be our high priest, per Hebrews 4:14, the bolded comment should get our attention. And since the last 6 verses of Hebrews 9 explain that Jesus’s role as our high priest is to deal with our sin problem, it’s appropriate to ask at this point:

Have we been asking our therapists, instead of Jesus, to deal with our sin problem? And if so, at what cost?

The following sources are ordered, more or less, by increasing credibility (in psychological circles). In other words, you’ll have a hard time writing off my final source 🙂

“Sacrificing your soul for the sake of your ego”…

…is the language used in a recent sermon (“Sin not: unburdening your conscience”)(2) by Michael Gowens to describe the exchange frequently offered by psychology. Having the excuse of being sick, rather than sinful, is a lot easier on the ego, but it comes at a price; giving up moral accountability makes us, basically, big-brained apes. We lose our humanity.

What’s worse, our original problem…the guilt of sin…remains. Gowens quotes Anglican minister John Stott, who  quotes the head of a large English mental hospital as saying, “I could dismiss half my patients tomorrow if they could be assured of forgiveness.”

My fellow sheep, we’ve wandered deep into the dangerous woods in our flight from accountability. Bringing our sins to the Good Shepherd, rather than paying a psychologist to simply redefine them, is the Way back home.

Into the sanctum sanctorum

But some will be underwhelmed by a Christian preacher (Gowens) and a Christian philosopher (Evans) suggesting that we’re demanding too much of psychologists. Let’s go to the source, shall we?

Thomas Szasz “served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York”, per Wikipedia (3), and won many awards, including:

1. American Psychological Association Rollo May Award (1998)
2. Humanist of the Year (1973)
3. Humanist Laureate Award (1995)

But Szasz, it turns out, was something of a heretic; his most famous book was probably The Myth of Mental Illness (3).

In his obituary in the Guardian (4), we find a couple of highly relevant passages.

“Szasz was an atheist, but he said his atheism was ‘religious’. He called human beings ineffable, in the sense that they could not be ultimately described by a system or a science. Psychotherapy was likewise ineffable – a secular form of the ‘cure of souls’. Psychotherapists were more like rabbis or priests than like medical doctors.”

Again, we’re asking our therapists to assume the role of priests…which means we’re asking them to deal with our sin problem.

And once again, we see that the price of this service goes far beyond deductibles and copays:

“He told me that he ‘felt viscerally upset’ by ‘the dehumanised language of psychiatry and psychoanalysis’…”

So now we have the decorated atheist psychiatrist…not just the Christian philosopher and the Christian preacher…implying that we’re bringing our sin problem to psychologists, and also highlighting psychology’s disturbing trend towards dehumanization.

But was Szasz, despite his credentials and awards, really just a lone crackpot? You probably guessed the answer already…

Existential murder

Jeffrey Schaler has also assembled an impressive resume (former member of the psychology faculty at Johns Hopkins University (5)), and advances some similarly unorthodox ideas. His most inflammatory book is probably Addiction is a Choice. I found the Amazon page (6) for this book illuminating, and not just because it includes high praise from Joseph Gerstein, M.D. F.A.C.P., Harvard Medical School.

In the front matter of the book, we find a quote which once again repeats the theme of this post (emphasis mine):

“It is one of the most mysterious compensatory phenomena of our history that the individual, the more forcefully he seeks to emerge from a world rooted in collectivism, stubbornly undermines his own qualities, by means of a doctrine of man which assigning each feature and peculiarity in turn to non-individual forces that in the end become completely dehumanized… This is the alchemy of the modern age, the transmogrification of subject into object, of man into a thing against which the destructive urge may wreak its fury without constraint.”

Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke, Doctors of Infamy (1949)

You have to think back to grammar school to absorb the point here. If we become objects like rocks or apples, and no longer subjects which make moral decisions and act on other objects, we may feel like we’re no longer morally accountable; but we also become, as mere objects, fair game for the destructive urges of others. And if you are wondering what furious destructive urges they have in mind, Dr. Josef Mengele would be Exhibit A;  Doctors of Infamy is about the horrors perpetrated by Nazi doctors. Which is a perfect segue to this excerpt from Aaron Olson’s eloquent Amazon review of Addiction is a Choice:

“The medical model of addiction existentially murders the person. It turns the person into a Zombie, a neuronal soup of chemicals directing one’s life. It sees addiction as a happening, rather than a willful choice.”

Once again, we see an attempt to remove moral culpability, to deal with our sin problem, by reducing human decisions to products of a neuronal soup of chemicals…and the horrifying result of this doomed quest.

But two oddballs, regardless of where they went to school, do not create anything like a consensus. So we can safely ignore Schaler and Szasz.

Right?

Moving beyond the apostates

Karl Menninger was one of the most respected psychiatrists of the 20th century. On his Wikipedia page, you will see a photograph of him with Eleanor Roosevelt, and find out that he received the presidential medal of freedom from Jimmy Carter (7). In 2020, his eponymous clinic was ranked #5 in psychiatry by U.S. News and World Report (8).

So what did this giant in the field have to say about Szasz’s insurgency? Their personal correspondence (9), shortly before Menninger’s death, might surprise you.

Menninger:

“I think I understand better what has disturbed you these years and, in fact, -it disturbs me, too, now. We don’t like the situation that prevails whereby a fellow human being is put aside, outcast as it were, ignored, labeled and said to be ‘sick in his mind.’ If he can pay for care and treatment, we will call him a patient and record a ‘diagnosis’ (given to his relatives for a fee). He is listened to and then advised to try to relax, consider his past sins to be forgiven,…”

This sobering letter is actually pretty short; I highly recommend you read the whole thing.

In the meantime, maybe someone can help me understand this; if “sin” is just a leftover concept from a pre-scientific, pre-psychological era, a concept which judgmental, willfully ignorant religious zealots refuse to let go of, and if we know so much more now about why people make bad decisions, and if we understand it’s not an issue of morality at all, but rather a pathology…if we have entered this new era of enlightenment about the human condition, why is no less an expert than Karl Menninger acknowledging the concept of “sin”? Why, indeed, did he write an entire book called “Whatever Became of Sin?” (10)?

Our attempt to offload our sin problem onto psychologists, rather than embrace Jesus’s finished work of redemption, is seeming more and more like a failed experiment.

And did you notice that, once again, Menninger reminds us of the dehumanization wrought by psychology and psychiatry (“…a fellow human being is put aside, outcast as it were, ignored…”)?

We’re going to continue this line of reasoning in a minute, but first, we need a little time-out. Despite everything I’ve presented so far, many people will protest that their preference for psychologists instead of pastors has nothing to do with sin. So, let’s examine the rationale that is probably most commonly given.

Data-driven mediums?

You’ve heard the mantra by now: “evidence-based care”.

Supposedly, we started going to “mental health professionals” (the quotes are because “mind”, the root word of “mental”, should refer to the immaterial part of us!) because, unlike pastors, their techniques are driven by the results of carefully controlled studies conducted per the scientific method. A flight from accountability had nothing to do with it.

Well, I cannot judge the motives of everyone out there, but I can make some inferences from data-free articles about the paranormal, like this one (11), on Psychology Today. Psychology Today, by the way, was recommended by The New York Times as a source for finding therapists (12).

In the Psychology Today article, by Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, we learn that ghosts and spirits are probably real, and further, that belief in these entities can be beneficial to your mental health. No data is presented to back up these claims, but she tells the tale of Phil (among others), a construction worker who received a message from his late son via a coworker’s dream. We also read about some individuals who have benefited by going to see a medium.

Wait, what!? A medium? Promoted on Psychology Today??

My takeaway: A lot of us were never really looking for data in the first place. What we want is happiness without accountability (13), and we want it desperately enough to turn to psychology, random ghosts and spirits, and, yes, mediums.

Guilty, your honor

I acknowledge I’m begging a lot of questions in this post. I don’t plan on preemptively answering them, because it’s already a long post. I’ll just say for now that I’m not claiming all psychologists should switch careers. I’ll be happy to engage you further if you want to chat about this.

Don’t shoot the messenger

Remember when I said “Having the excuse of being sick, rather than sinful, is a lot easier on the ego…”?

I can understand how that could offend a lot of people, but before you get too upset with me, you need to know that those aren’t actually my words. They come from none other than the eloquent Dr. Hobart Mowrer, former president of the American Psychological Association:

“For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch making. But at length we have discovered that to be free in this sense, that is, to have the excuse of being sick rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost… In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity, and with neurotics, themselves, we find ourselves asking: Who am I, what is my deepest destiny, what does living mean?” (14)

Jesus Christ, our risen Lord and Savior, is the answer to our sin problem, not psychologists. Let’s reclaim our humanity and come back home.

God bless,

TFOTF

Alternate ending (15):

“Neurotic means he is not as sensible as I am, and psychotic means he’s even worse than my brother-in-law.” ~ Karl A. Menninger

(1) The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith

(2) Sin not: unburdening your conscience

(3) Thomas Szasz on Wikipedia

(4) Thomas Szasz on The Guardian

(5) Jeffrey Schaler on Wikipedia

(6) Addiction is a Choice

(7) Karl Menninger on Wikipedia

(8) Menninger clinic on Wikipedia

(9) Letter from Menninger to Szasz

(10) Whatever Became of Sin?

(11) Ghosts and Spirits on Psychology Today

(12) Psychology Today on Wikipedia

(13) Happiness without accountability

(14) Hobart Mowrer on Goodreads

(15) Your psycho brother-in-law