Session 1: Biblical Anthropology in a Psychologized Culture

[0:00] When we're talking about counseling, we're going to do it a little bit different way. We're going to talk about what it means to counsel in the psychologized world.! And the reason I think this is important is because we live in a culture in the United States that is, though we're Christians and we actually have a culture.

[0:29] It is counter to something. Everywhere where the gospel brings life, it creates a counterculture. It creates a culture within another culture.

[0:44] And so for us to be able to minister in this culture, both to one another and ultimately to other people, we need to understand how our culture, how we as enculturated Christians, interact with a larger culture.

[0:58] And so this is going to be a chance to kind of talk through what does it mean to counsel and minister to folks in a culture that is psychologized.

[1:12] There's going to be critique here. And so if you have a psychology background, there will be critique. My goal here, though, is not to just simply come in and critique psychology. I want to do something more.

[1:29] I want to talk about the world we live in and what the worldview is and how we're embedded in it and then how both ourselves and others are shaped by that world and how we think, how we process, how we understand ourselves.

[1:47] And where if we're trying to counsel people from God's word, how we need to engage. And so this is going to be a lot of material about understanding the psychologized world.

[2:01] But also, I want you to help me to know how it would apply to your circumstances, how the people you relate to in the church, outside the church, how you might share the gospel, how you might relate to family, friends.

[2:15] And so the goal is to just kind of give you a way of thinking about this so that when you counsel, you're counseling thoughtfully into the world you're speaking.

[2:29] My concern is when we talk about biblical counseling, a lot of times what we end up with is people taking Bible verses and just kind of throwing them into somebody's life, decontextualized.

[2:41] Or if they're not doing that, they're unaware of how much they're affected by the culture and they screen out biblical truth and replace it with quasi-Christian thinking that is as much about psychology as it is about the Bible.

[3:02] But neither of those is helpful for the purpose of ministry because the one, the just dropping Bible verses and Bible concepts into people's lives, decontextualized, leads people to understand, well, how does this really apply to my life?

[3:16] What does it really mean? And to do the other means we're giving people a false sense of what Jesus came in to do and how he changed his lives.

[3:27] And so this is going to be a lecture kind of process, but I'm going to pause and interact with you over things that you're thinking about as you're ministering to people.

[3:39] So what I want you to do is as we're talking to just simply think through situations you're ministering in. Again, it might be people, friends in the church.

[3:50] If you want to talk about situations you're in that involve people in the church, just be discreet. You know, we don't want to be like, oh, that guy over there. This is a problem I have with him. Be discreet.

[4:03] But there may be, again, family members. A lot of times I'll find that people are trying to know how to relate what God is doing in their lives, how to minister to family members or friends, coworkers, different ways where you're trying to just interact and relate.

[4:19] And so I hope what this does is gives you a better framework for understanding your mission in a psychologized culture. In his book, we're going to do three things.

[4:32] The first section is going to be on biblical anthropology. How do we understand ourselves and how anthropology functions in a psychologized world?

[4:43] So that's going to be our first session. The second session is going to be actually dealing with how do we understand the mental health world? And by mental health world, I mean the entire set of systems that are set up to diagnose and care for people who are struggling with problems that are often called mental health problems.

[5:05] And so we're going to look at that. And the goal of that is to help understand what's actually being done when you're talking about a diagnosis. What exactly is, what is going on with medication? We're not going to go deep into it, but I want to give you a framework to understand what's happening when we hear all these diagnostic terms and words and labels and what they mean and what they don't mean.

[5:27] Where they're beneficial, where they might be deficient. And then the third session is going to be how do you minister to somebody who's kind of just lived and grown up in and imbibe a therapeutic view of themselves?

[5:40] And I don't mean therapeutic negatively. I simply mean somebody where they just don't question some of the assumptions that we have in this culture about the way we understand ourselves and our problems.

[5:54] That's what we're getting at. We all know there are problems. We all have problems. We all struggle in various ways. How do we understand those struggles? How do we know how to relate to those struggles?

[6:04] How does the Bible speak to us about those struggles? How does the world tell us how to deal with those struggles? And where do we need to find a way to interject biblical truth into a world that doesn't think biblically?

[6:20] So that's the goal. I'm going to pray and then we're going to jump right in. Heavenly Father, I do pray this morning for those who are here, Lord, that this investment of their time would be meaningful and helpful.

[6:31] It would serve them both in their thinking and also practically in ministry situations that they find themselves in right now. Lord, guide us, God, as we talk.

[6:43] Help us to turn this into a collaborative effort, O Lord Jesus. And Spirit of God, just come and speak. We're not going to be in the scriptures heavily today.

[6:55] But I do pray that you would speak through what we're doing. In Jesus' name. Amen. In his book, The Rise of the Modern Self, Carl Truman is the author.

[7:12] He channels concepts of philosopher Charles Taylor described contemporary Western self-identity. Taylor talks about culture as a social imaginary.

[7:24] A collective sense of identity that each culture accepts and lives comfortably within. Social imaginary is simply the embedded assumptions about life that are found in each culture.

[7:42] And every culture and subculture has those, just givens. The social imaginary is the givens. We just all know this. We all assume this. And Carl Truman summarizes that the social imaginary is the way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it.

[8:07] That is emphatically not to make the social imaginary simply into a set of identifiable ideas. It is the totality of the way we look at our world to make sense of it and to make sense of our behavior within it.

[8:23] That's what we're talking about. How we understand the world. I was just talking to, what's your name again? Elena. Elena. So Elena, who grew up down in Atlanta, like I did.

[8:33] And the differences in culture between the deep south and up here in New England, they're subtle in terms of a global perspective.

[8:45] But growing up in the south, the first thing I noticed when I came up north was nobody talked about the Civil War. Like down south, the Civil War was still a big thing because the war shaped everything about the culture.

[9:04] I came up here and the Civil War was irrelevant. And so there was a social imaginary in the deep south about being a defeated, we were the only people in this country who had a sense of defeat in our identity.

[9:21] Also differences racially, ethnically. In the deep south, at least when I was growing up, it was primarily black and white. There had been no immigration. There was no Jewish or Italian immigrants or Polish or Irish.

[9:38] You're just black and white. Now, obviously that's changed now with immigration from Mexico and South America. But the idea was that down there, it was very simple.

[9:53] Ralph D'Aberdathy was talking about racial differences in the north and south. And he was one of the kings of the lieutenants. And he said, referencing blacks as they interact with whites, he said, down in the south, people, any white people, don't care how close you are as long as you don't get too high.

[10:19] Up north, people don't care how high you are as long as you don't get too close. And that was his understanding. That was a social imaginary, the difference that people just assumed.

[10:33] So that's what we're talking about. Cultures had these imaginaries. Taylor coined the term expressive individualism to attempt to capture the Western, particularly American, social imaginary.

[10:48] Expressive individualism. This is not a novel concept. Christopher Lash's controversial 1979 assessment of 20 cents a year in America, the culture of narcissism coined the phrase the therapeutic self.

[11:05] 1979. 1996, Ronald Warkin critiqued American culture in his book as the rise of the imperial self, which he identified as a culture dominated by individuality, self-expression, autonomy, and self-esteem.

[11:23] So this idea of what we orient to in American culture, Western culture in general, but American culture particularly, is a highly individualistic, self-oriented understanding of life.

[11:45] One of our pastors this past week was just, you know, in his sermon, was just kind of talking through some things. And he said, he was talking about, he's a young man, he's in his mid-20s.

[11:56] And he said, he said, ground zero in my life is what I think about myself. And that's a great way to capture this idea of expression of individualism.

[12:08] What I think about myself is how I orient to the world. That's the world we live in. I think I'm not telling you something you don't know and don't experience.

[12:20] And maybe see in hyperdrive in a world of higher education around here. Where this idea of my own self-identity.

[12:34] And what's been added to it in the last few years is not simply I need to express myself, but you need to authenticate however I want to express myself.

[12:46] My personhood not only requires my right and ability to express myself, but it requires those around me to affirm and authenticate and celebrate how I think about myself.

[13:05] That's what we're talking about. This is not a seminar in American culture. This cultural understanding is important for you and me as Christians in this culture.

[13:16] This is the world in which we live and move and have our being, as Paul said. Did we use another Pauline phrase? This is the manner of life to which our old self is very much attached.

[13:30] If you read Ephesians 4, Paul's talking, calling the believers out of a former manner of life that you learned and that is attached to the old way, and he's calling people into a new manner of life that is in Christ.

[13:50] What I want to help us do is understand the world better, to understand the ways it relates to human problems and suffering, and to learn how to do better fellowship and ministry.

[14:01] One of my concerns in my own church is that if we live with this sense of cultural individual expressionism, it actually comes into the church in the way we care for one another.

[14:15] When someone is dealing with a problem, how we relate to one another, how we understand one another, what's the nature of our problems. And so we can be in the church really feeding this worldview to one another.

[14:31] Without even knowing it, because we're like fish in the ocean. It's what we breathe. It's all we know. And so we have to think outside of what we know to do effective ministry.

[14:45] I have a few baseline points out of which we'll be operating. One is we live in a psychologized culture that we all, and we're all inherently shaped by that culture.

[14:57] That includes Christians. So you and I are not exempt. Coming to Christ is a radical change in our hearts, but it's a call to change our thinking about who we are and how we live in this world.

[15:13] That doesn't come overnight. That's a lifelong process because we're in a battle against the world. The world entices us to conforming to the way it thinks.

[15:23] The world sets up its values and then calls us to love those values and to pursue those values. So we are psychologized people.

[15:34] I am a psychologized person. The psychologized culture is distinctly shaped by Western, first world, affluent values that do not translate coherently to other cultural settings.

[15:55] To take American, particularly American values, Europe has its own sort of set of values based on the histories of the different countries, but in America, our values don't translate well into other cultures without simply overtaking those cultures.

[16:18] I teach biblical counseling in Adi Sabo, Ethiopia, and it's amazing how hard it is to teach counseling in a culture that is pre-psychologized.

[16:33] Now, a lot of the folks I teach are at university school, and so they're familiar with things. They certainly know Netflix and by their phones understand culture.

[16:49] They know the music. All that's this expressive individualism coming into the culture, but they don't have concepts to understand basic things that we find interesting.

[17:01] I was doing a course back in May there on complex problems, and I was trying to find some way to give them something to work with, and I found there was a show produced in Kenya that is kind of like, it's kind of like TED Talks for Kenya, essentially.

[17:30] Very well done, usually done. But they had a guy on there who's Kenyan, and he was talking about dealing with depression, and he shared how his depression was not understood by his culture, that he needed to find Western counseling to be able to help him deal with it.

[17:49] But he was a musician. He was a performance artist, musician. And so he did this song, and it was in Swahili. And he sang this beautiful song in Swahili, but it's interesting because every word was in Swahili, except he had to insert the word depression into the song because there's no concept in Swahili to define depression as it's defined here.

[18:20] That's common. Our way of thinking requires affluence. It requires a certain way of understanding who we are in relationship to family, who we are in relationship to community, how laws are set up, what rights we have as individuals, our collective history.

[18:44] All those things come into play that shape who we are, that when we sort of think we can walk into another culture and drop that in, it doesn't work. And so as a result, we have to see what we're dealing with is what seems to be very common and self-understood in our culture.

[19:12] It is very distinct in other cultures. It's very different. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. A third point, the psychological worldview is built on an anthropology that's inherently opposed to biblical anthropology.

[19:29] That's where we're going to spend most of the time in the next few minutes, so I'll just let you know. Psychology is, as an anthropology, is inherently opposed to biblical anthropology.

[19:43] There's not any real place within to connect. A fourth point, effective biblical ministry and fellowship requires we understand the culture and values and assumptions carried by the people to whom we minister without imbibing those values in the way we bring ministry.

[20:02] So in a sense, we are going to be counterculture in our ministry. And what makes it hard is that we're not counterculture in our own thinking. So we have to be self-evaluative before we can evaluate how to help other people.

[20:19] So let's begin. Definition of psychology, the study of the soul. Psychology, often these days, it's being portrayed as a science.

[20:31] It's a social science. But it really is, and it says, it's the study of the soul. The study of humanness as individually perceived and understood.

[20:49] And it's a system of understanding. And to talk about this, I want to use, as a biblical counselor, David Powelson. You guys familiar with David Powelson? Okay, so David Powelson, you really want to, if you know Tim Keller, and you're a fan of Tim Keller, what Keller did for generally understanding the gospel into the culture as believers, Powelson was good at in dealing with counseling.

[21:18] He knew how to engage this psychologized world in a winsome way, in a thoughtful way. And so, Powelson uses what we call an upstream, downstream metaphor.

[21:28] So we're going to kind of use that as a basis for understanding. The world of psychology, you might want to see, is a river that flows from upstream to downstream. And I sort of have it in a very crude sort of a graphic there.

[21:44] At the top end of this, at the fountainhead of the world of psychology, is the area of theology and philosophy. There are philosophical worldviews that shape psychology.

[22:00] Those produce, a little farther downstream, theories. So based on this, these philosophical understandings, here are theories that make sense of what that means.

[22:14] And out of those theories then come models and methodologies of application. And then out of those methodologies become practices. Now we have these models.

[22:24] What are the practices that flow from those models and methodologies? And then, what is the cultural effect of these kinds of practices?

[22:37] So that's a good way to understand this idea of psychology as a worldview. It starts in the world of philosophy and it works its way through theories, which we'll be looking at mostly today in the first session, and then models and methodologies and then therapeutic practices, how these get put into play, and then how do they affect people and culture and social trends.

[23:06] So as we go through this material, we'll process it through, I want you to process through your personal orientation. I think you will find that each of these models and theories that we talk about are going to have in some sense relevance to how you've thought about life or something you're familiar with.

[23:23] So we're going to navigate the upstream and downstream dynamic. In the area of theology and philosophy, we're talking about the area of psychological anthropology.

[23:36] This is the fountainhead of any theory of the soul. Whether you're looking at secular or religious worldviews, there are four basic anthropological questions that must be addressed.

[23:49] Who are we? Who am I? What's wrong with me? Because one of the things every human being has an awareness of is things aren't right.

[24:03] Nobody lives in this world in the delusion that everything's right and will end up right. What we know is that we enter into the world, there is suffering, and then there is death.

[24:17] And how do you explain that? And how do you navigate life because of that? So what's wrong with us? The third question coming out of that is what should be right with us.

[24:32] There's a sense we all have that it should not be this way. Why is it this way? Why is life hard? Why is life unjust? Why do I suffer in the way I do?

[24:43] Why is there unexplainable suffering in this world? What should be right? If this weren't the case, what would it be right?

[24:57] What's the way it should be? And then the fourth question is what would it take to fix the problem?

[25:09] Every anthropology is dealing in some sense with those questions. So how does a biblical Christian answer those questions? I'm going to take you guys through it. You help me as well-taught church members.

[25:24] Who are we? Who are we? What do you know from the bottom? Sinners? Yeah, but more fundamentally than that.

[25:37] Image of God. Yeah, we're persons created in the image of God. That's what the Bible tells us.

[25:48] What else do we know? That's a loaded statement right there, isn't it? God created man, male, and female.

[26:03] so there is gender distinction in creation. We're creating the image of God one.

[26:19] Worship. To serve. Yeah. Is that what you mean? What's your mission statement for the church? To glorify God by making disciples of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.

[26:33] Yeah, so that's what we're called to be. That's one way of expressing it, right? To worship God. Is worship simply growling at the foot of a deity?

[26:44] Is that what we do? We just, we sacrifice to a God to appease him or her or it so that we can experience a good life?

[27:02] Is that what it is? What's the purpose? What's our, why are we here? Going back to Genesis to have dominion.

[27:17] Yeah, to express dominion, we've been given a responsibility by God which means we're distinct from other creatures God has created, right?

[27:29] We are distinct because of this, of what things? First of all, one of the things is this idea that we've been given a job. More, more fundamental even than that is what?

[27:42] We're created for relationship with God, to walk with God, to enjoy him. As Augustine said, to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

[27:56] That's one way to understand who we are. That's what, that's what we are. In other words, our life is lived in relationship to have been created for a purpose and given identity in relationship to God who we are seeing, are meant to see as both Lord over us but also the one who cares for us.

[28:28] That's the distinctly Christian view of who we are. We can expound on that but that's good enough for right now. So what's wrong with us? We're sinners.

[28:40] We're sinners, right? Whatever that is that we were supposed to enjoy has been marred. What is sin?

[28:54] Disobedience. Yet it starts as disobedience. It's a rejection of God's rightful lordship and his loving, gracious provision for us.

[29:10] It's both. You can't just sort of we reject his lordship. We're also rejecting his provision for us saying we can do it on our own.

[29:21] We don't need God. So part of the fundamental problem is a rejection of who we are meant to be and how we're meant to live in the favor and rather to be live for ourselves according to our own ways.

[29:47] Romans 1 and 2 talk about that. What does that produce? What does God say to Adam?

[30:03] In a nutshell. Death? Yeah. Yeah. Now you'll die. Not just a physical death. Separation from God. Futility.

[30:17] Ignorance. Blindness. Self-destruction. Idolatry. That's what's wrong with us according to the Bible.

[30:33] What should be right with us? I'll answer that one quickly. What should be right with us is that we have a restored relationship with God.

[30:44] That whatever's been made wrong gets made right. Cornelius Plantinga talks about this in terms of shalom.

[30:57] The right standing in the right place is peace. Shalom. Plantinga defines it as living the way things ought to be.

[31:09] God created and set something up so that we would flourish. And because of sin we no longer flourish. We live in futility. and so we are not living in the way things ought to be.

[31:24] And so the restoration that should come to us is that we return to a place of shalom. A place of peace with God, a peace in our soul, and a peace in our world.

[31:38] That's why I wrote the book Peace. Because I wanted to explore this idea of what does it mean to be reconciled to God and one another and to have peace in a world full of strife.

[31:51] What does it mean to have peace? So that's what should be right with us and what does it take to fix the problem? From a biblical perspective, what fixes the problem?

[32:04] Jesus. What about Jesus? Jesus dying for us. Yes. And what is the death? Is it just simply a random death? The death that covers our sins.

[32:16] Yes. It's an atonement. Our sins need to be dealt with. They need to be purged. They need to have them be removed from us so that God can relate to us as if we were not sinners.

[32:30] And he sent the Son as a propitiation for our sins so that we might no longer live in judgment but live not only in righteousness but in restored relationship and even adoption and new relationship.

[32:54] And so in a sense the remedy of the Bible is the latter will be better than the former. Because ultimately what we're meant to do is in eternity have an unbroken relationship with God.

[33:08] and this is crucial. Christianity the Bible understands that life does not end here. That this is a continuation.

[33:21] Death moves us in a continuation into another state of life which is eternal either punishment or eternal blessing. So that's the way the Bible understands anthropology.

[33:37] anthropology. So you've got that and what I want you to do is we're going to look at three different ways to understand anthropology and how they differ from the Bible and how these make up the psychological worldview.

[33:52] So we're going to do a little bit of history trying to go through this pretty quickly. The rise of modern psychological theories of human behavior occurred in the mid to late 19th century. Prior to the 19th century most work was done through a spiritual lens or understood through a spiritual lens or through a rudimentary medical lens.

[34:12] But changes brought about by the enlightenment and the scientific revolution created an environment out of which the psychological culture developed. Humanistic philosophy and culture, cultural modernism create an alternative understanding of the soul.

[34:27] So what is the primal goo of psychology? Well, several factors. Religious liberalism and higher criticism was an attack on the veracity of the Bible and the orthodox Christianity in the academy.

[34:44] So at the upper end of philosophy and theology, the Bible was set aside in favor of rationalism. That results in sort of a rationalistic scientific empiricism.

[35:01] Truth is not transcendent. it must be reasoned out. A lot of what I'm doing in studying religious liberty is how that played out in the colonial revolutionary periods in this country and what were the what was the thinking about God that was going on?

[35:22] What was changing? We know that up here in New England, what would have been orthodox Puritan Calvinistic Christianity was giving way to all manner of deistic and unitarian tendencies which prevail to this day.

[35:41] Truth is not transcendent. It must be reasoned out. Romanticism in a response to really what happened in the French Revolution when the Enlightenment kind of project blew up, the reaction was romanticism.

[35:59] Rather than going from we have an academy of pure reason that we appeal to, now we go the opposite direction saying no, what you feel is what happened.

[36:12] So romanticism as a period is what feels. It has to do with what the human experience and impulse is where romanticism comes.

[36:26] So you get this idea that what's inside of me is what really matters. You have Darwinian anthropology. Every human experience can be understood in purely rationalistic terms.

[36:39] Darwin says, man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system, kind of overstatement there at that time, with all these exalted powers, man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

[37:10] That is Darwin's anthropology. Karl Marx, Marxian materialism, when I was in college, that was my field of study, I was a Marxist, and I studied Marxism as my, that was my, that was my, essentially studying my degree.

[37:29] Human problems are not internal, they're entirely external, and they come from alienated social existence. And so Marx is well known for saying religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of the soulless conditions is the opium of the people.

[37:51] And then humanist spirituality, William James, not very familiar these days as a name, but actually is very prominent in terms of conceptual ideas these days.

[38:02] Belief, see if this doesn't resonate with anybody you know, belief is a valid human experience that has no quantifiable relationship to the existence of God.

[38:16] So it's important for you to have belief in something, but it doesn't have to be God. James says, religion is the feelings, acts, and experience of individual men or women in their solitude so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

[38:42] Does that sound pretty current? Yeah. So William James kind of fell out into disfavor, but now essentially, and that's what really broke me away from my final moorings as a Christian or growing up in the church was William James, reading William James and realizing I don't need, I can just have belief in whatever.

[39:05] I'm reading a book right now on hope and it's actually a secular book, but the underlying of the book is hope is not, it doesn't have to be anything in particular, it's a set of thinking about yourself, you can hope in yourself, and that's true hope, that's William James.

[39:27] Here's the key, all these philosophies have as a starting point the denial of a transcendent God, all current theories and methodologies flow out of some combination of these anthropologies, so I gave you those briefly because that's the primal goo, that's the philosophical underpinnings of all psychological thinking in the Western culture.

[39:54] So the three basic theories coming out of those philosophies, three basic theories, I'm using three because I'm trying to kind of keep it, there's probably 650 different psychological theories currently in operation right now, and they're all contradictory, but in one way or the other, they fit into one of these three camps, so in order to break it down to this level, there's overlapping, so I don't want to oversimplify it, but it's important to recognize that these three kind of schools have retained relevance up to this day.

[40:38] So the first one I would call the psychobiology field, these are kind of in historical order, the psychobiology field, in that field our problems are physically a part of us and must be alleviated by externally administered treatment.

[40:57] Modern psychology began in the field of medicine, biological connection of character and mental health has a long history, theory. My brain theories, even in the 1800s, are popular.

[41:15] The insane asylum gives way to the psychiatric hospital. field is developed in sort of a linear progression.

[41:26] As different medical advances happen, they're applied in various different ways to psychological conditions, diagnostic technology, medical research, pharmacology.

[41:40] In its contemporary expression, the psychobiology field is dominated by pharmacology. Psychobiology field has become intertwined with the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance field.

[41:57] They work together in our current culture in a way that's created the medical model approach to psychological care. We can talk about that if you want. The reason it's been prominent is because of what medicine can do, what insurance will pay for, and what pharmaceutical companies are willing to produce, able to produce.

[42:23] Those drive the medical model. So what does it say? Who are we? According to the medical model, according to the psychobiology model, who are we?

[42:36] This is the way I would say it. If you're taking notes, you don't have to take it. I'm just trying to give you the ideas. We live as biological entities in a materialistic world with no verifiable transcendent reality.

[42:53] Humanness is a biological construct. We are the product of our evolutionary development, that's obviously Darwin, as it shapes and is shaped by genetic and chemical factors common to nature.

[43:12] one of the last 30 years. The development of what we call the evolutionary psychology is actually trying to understand human personality and at its best as an adaptation through evolution.

[43:30] So whenever you read articles, particularly popular articles about some psychological condition or whatever it is, some behavior tendency, you'll always see some reference to this comes from this adaptation in evolution.

[43:48] That's what we're talking about in the psychological field. What's wrong with us? Our problems, needs are us. In other words, everything is in our physicality.

[44:01] Our greatest problems are the limits of our bodies to function at a capacity that allows us to experience pleasure and minimize pain during our lifespan. So if we are just simply evolved creatures, then the goal is for us to lead with maximum enjoyment and minimal pain as long as possible.

[44:20] So here, I'm at an age where everything I get on my news feed seems to speak to getting older and the avoidance of things and turning back age.

[44:30] And there's so many different things coming soon where you can actually turn back age and this craving to put off death.

[44:42] What's fascinating, and this is an aside, it's produced a culture, and this is the idea of a lot of it, where medical science can extend bodily life beyond personal meaning.

[45:01] And so what you see now among the aging is they can live until 90 or 95. they have no meaning of life past 80. The last 15 years are just waiting to die.

[45:15] And they can be kept. One of the great struggles in gerontology is this idea that medicine knows how to keep people alive.

[45:26] It doesn't know how to make their lives meaningful. And that's what's going on in psychomiology. what should be right with us. In this model, in the psychobiology model, what should be right with us, our potential is a reasonable quality of life as long as life can be reasonably lived.

[45:46] The pursuit of change is only inhibited by the limits of applied science and the moral conventions of society to which we live. we can do a whole lot more if we just cast off the moral issues that come with the fact that we can't reinvent people.

[46:06] So, what would it take to fix the problem? The solution occurs as identifiable physical abnormalities are medically treated. The medical profession with specialized training in psychological disorders, using medical treatments to address biological abnormalities is the changing.

[46:24] you're always looking for what's the presumed change agent. In this case, it's the medical profession. And psychologists and psychiatrists understood in their medical capacity.

[46:36] So, where, take a pause for a second to this, where would you see this in your world? Where do you, what are your reference points for this? This idea of, physical and everything that needs to change about who we are and our thinking and feeling and behavior and condition is physiology at work.

[47:10] The idea that if you're depressed, just take medication. Yeah, yeah, yeah, some medication for depression or anything really. Yeah, yeah.

[47:21] Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess the assumption, even in the medical field, that the highest goal is to alleviate pain and prolong life.

[47:37] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a Yeah. Yeah. Think about this. Where is the mind? Where is the mind?

[47:53] Where is the mind? The brain. Is the mind the same thing as the brain? Well, in this view maybe. Is that? In this view maybe? Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[48:05] It's interesting because according to this view, there is no soul, there is no personhood separate from brain function.

[48:19] Your identity is an extension of neurons fire. Who you are as a person is only physiology.

[48:35] Now, and that one of the challenges with this approach is that we can see how yeah, if you can limit it to well, there are certain medications that are targeted and we're going to talk about medications later to help people with certain physiological factors, that's good, but why stop there?

[49:01] why not pharmacologically reorienting the brain so that it thinks differently? It can be done.

[49:12] the point is, when the brain is total identity, then personhood is lost.

[49:26] Agency is lost. And so that's why we have to be very careful when we ascribe to a medical approach, when we ascribe to a physiology, biology, the underlying philosophy behind that is that you're no different than a lower level animal, except for brain capacity is great.

[49:56] And that's profoundly affecting in the way you think about who you are as a person and what you need as a person.

[50:09] So keep that in mind, because it should cause us to pause a little bit when we think about, well, clearly there's something wrong in their brain. What are we really saying in that?

[50:23] We're identifying everything with physiology. And if we're going to help people, if we're going to understand ourselves, we have to deal with the philosophical question, am I more than my brain?

[50:34] or am I only my brain? So that's psychobiology. Second one, psychodynamic field.

[50:46] Psychodynamic field, in the psychodynamic field, all problems are within us and all solutions are outside of us. And so in the biology realm, we are the problem.

[51:01] Our physicality is the problem, the limits of our physicality. In psychodynamic field, all problems are within us and all solutions are outside of us. Sigmund Freud developed concepts that undergird all theories of the psychodynamic field.

[51:16] Freud was a physician who received training in neurology and developed an inherent interest in treating patients, suffering from what he called hysterical conditions. Freudian psychology took hold in Europe at the end of the 19th century but swept in the U.S.

[51:34] among the cultural and academic needs when Freud embarked on a lecture tour of the states in 1909. His successors, while staying within the basic tenets of his psychodynamic model, differed sharply and reacted against one at some points.

[51:51] Jung and others would differ with Freud as significant points. But the underlying basis of understanding of who we are remains Freudian. And we'll get to what it means in a second.

[52:03] Viktor Frankl, for example, his experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz undermined his Freudian training. Freud had no place for any kind of transcendence.

[52:18] And so Frankl developed his treatment theories around the idea that psychological health required finding meaning in life to stave off the three universal tragedies of pain, guilt, and death.

[52:30] It's still psychodynamic because it treats personhood as fundamentally disordered and need a specialized help to reverse that state. Classic psychotherapy, by which we mean Freudian psychotherapy, is primarily occurring in the academic settings and among the wealthy who can afford an open-ended and intensive approach to counseling.

[52:55] Most people are not going to get Freudian psychotherapy because it's presumed that you are in therapy your whole life, that therapy is part of a management of your life, and you're constantly working through the inner things to get to the outer things.

[53:11] So who are we? And this is going to sound complicated, and that's part of the problem with it. Who are we? Fundamental reality is conscious and unconscious existence in the natural world.

[53:27] To be human is to be subject to psychic drives that are shaped by early life experience, and which define how we live, think, and emote through the entirety of life experience.

[53:40] All human experience can be linked to deep-seated desires and fears that lodge in unconscious or subconscious areas of our minds. Freud identified these areas as the id, the ego, and the superego, terms he coined.

[53:55] While biology is assumed in his understanding, these are not biological categories, but they're abstractions in the mind. Again, they're not brain, they're mind. Freud thought in mind terms, not brain terms.

[54:08] To Freud, all human orientation can be linked to sexual desire and nor fear of death. Religious thought is a pathological attempt to find meaning in a hostile and godless cosmos.

[54:22] I read a book on cultural history of classical music, and Jim Swofford, the author, said this. He describes Freud's anthropology as an image of the mind as a fragile crust over an unconscious tide of urges, violence, sexuality, and pain.

[54:45] Freud on religion. Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful, hallucinatory confusion.

[54:58] Devout believers are safely guarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic tendencies. Their acceptance of the universal neuroses spares them from the task of constructing a personal one.

[55:12] So it's avoidance. Religion is avoidance of neuroses. So that's what we are. We are messed up. Our problems is internal turmoil that's beyond our ability to control or being recognized.

[55:32] In Freudian terms, it is repression of our unconscious and subconscious states which control our instincts and responses to life. This repression has a pathological effect on our psychic health and ability to function in the world around us.

[55:48] So if you're hearing this and you're saying, okay, some of it's familiar, but some of it just seems very esoteric. That's Freud. Freud is esoteric.

[56:00] Freud, everything that Freud says, he creates out of his own thinking. The problem with Freud, frankly, is he would probably have lost his license in detail.

[56:14] Because he basically built everything of his theories on one person and himself. He had one primary patient and then he analyzed himself.

[56:28] And all his theories are based on that. methodologies were dubious at best. So what should be right with us?

[56:39] The potential outcome of change is deeper insight and a continuing management of adverse psychic forces with gradual mastery over them.

[56:50] Therapy is traditionally understood as a lifelong pursuit, if not a necessity. back in the 60s and 70s, there were a slew of movies when psychotherapy was really at a peak, where in all the movies, the main characters, there was always a psychotherapist somewhere in there.

[57:11] They were just always going to therapy. And the whole idea of talking through problems is a Freudian concept. That's where that idea comes from.

[57:22] The couch, all those kind of things, that's all Freudian. So what does it take to fix the problem? This is where it gets really murky. We change by bringing the subconscious to the surface, thereby resolving inner conflict and neuroses, and eliminating pathological reactions to our psychic disorder.

[57:45] And the type of things we do is repression, projection, and denial. So those are pathological things. So you hear the word repression, they're repressing that, or they're in denial, or they're projecting that onto somebody using Freudian language.

[58:00] You're just predicting that only. That's Freudian language. The change agent is an expert therapist, a person who is trained to guide us into change through talk and evaluation of thinking and feeling.

[58:13] For example, the psychotherapist who uses the process of psychoanalysis to work out the inner turmoil of our conscious or subconscious desire.

[58:24] So I bring all this up because classic Freudianism is largely debunked now as a school.

[58:39] There are still people who are Freudians, but more often they're using the second and third generation of Freudians to build on, not Freud himself.

[58:51] But Freud is the fountaine of all this and you have to deal with him. What do you get that seems familiar to you from this?

[59:02] Where would you see evidence of psychoanalytic thinking in your world? I think a tendency to attribute a lot of problems to early childhood development.

[59:21] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Increasingly, one of the challenges with trauma, which we'll talk about later, is ruining trauma back even to the womb. Wow. So people can have trauma responses to what happened in the womb.

[59:36] In utero trauma, they call it. that's very Freudian. Very current, but it's very Freudian. What else?

[59:56] There's one staring us in the face. What? How do I, what is the change agent?

[60:11] Therapist. Yeah. Expertise. Expertise. I need an expert. I need somebody who's trained. What is that person supposed to do?

[60:26] What is the trained person supposed to do? They're supposed to help me figure out what's going on inside me and talk it out and resolve the inner struggle that I'm dealing with.

[60:43] Talk therapy traces to Freud. Paul Tripp. Have you ever read Paul Tripp? Paul Tripp, I was in a small group with him one time when we were just talking about this stuff and he said, you will never find talking out your problems as a remedy in the Bible.

[61:00] people. But yet here I am, I do it all the time. It is an assumption of Western American, Western culture, but particularly American culture, where we have the wherewithal to find people to talk with.

[61:18] Where the way you resolve problems is talking to people. Vocalizing. I don't know any other culture where people talk out their problems.

[61:33] They may go to somebody for wisdom. In many cultures they actually consider pathology that they don't talk about their problems. It's interesting to be in Ethiopia, among Ethiopians, they say no, people don't talk about their problems.

[61:47] Now, it doesn't mean they handle them well. When people have problems, they usually disappear working on their problems and then reappear in that culture. that's not exactly healthy. But the idea that I need to talk about my problems is just a foreign concept in most of the world.

[62:04] But it's the only way we know how to do it in this world. So that's Freudianism played out. Now, it develops in this third one, as we'll see.

[62:17] But this idea, when you're thinking about where do you see Freudianism, it's this, rather than everything located in the brain and you've got to medicate the brain, no, it's all churning somewhere in me.

[62:29] And I've got to get it out and talk it out. I have to have a cathartic experience. I have to have a breakthrough. The whole idea of a counseling breakthrough is Freudian.

[62:43] And I need an expert. Oh, you're not trained? You don't have a degree in this? I'm sorry, you can't help me. Freudianism. That's all Freudian. That comes from Freud.

[62:55] So the third is psychosocial field. In the psychosocial field, the problems are outside of us, but all the solutions are inside of us. So it's exactly the opposite of Freud.

[63:05] Where in Freud, all the problems are inside of us, we need help from outside. In the psychosocial field, all the problems are outside of us, all the solutions lie within us.

[63:19] This is a wide variety of theories that people understood in a relational social context. Each theory is concerned with helping people function well in a context, sometimes a context that's difficult to function well in.

[63:37] Some of the major schools that you would find in this home are what you call behaviorism. You've got three familiar with this, behaviorism. A school that focuses on learning. will learn behavior, so it presumes that our problems are maladaptive behavior to circumstances, and better behavior, and how can I retrain behavior?

[64:00] Cognitive therapy, very popular even to this day, developed out of the behavior of school, but cognitive therapy focuses on thinking patterns as the key to management.

[64:12] In 1970s, these kind of came together, so you'll still have cognitive therapists, you'll still have behaviors, more often you see CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, which means the goal of that kind of therapy is you're either behaving or thinking or feeling wrongly, and my job as a therapist is to help you think and feel right.

[64:35] And they're better adapt to your circumstances. There's a host of need-based theories. Their genesis is the positive humanist of William James, as we mentioned.

[64:49] The commonality that links them is generally an optimistic view that if some unmet need of a person can be addressed, that a person's inner potential can be reached.

[65:01] Maslow's hierarchy of needs, classic. Carl Rogers developed a counseling methodology based on unconditional positive regard and supportive listening as a way to help people achieve self-actualization on their highest potential.

[65:17] So anything that's related to human potential, anything that's related to you can be a better person, anything that's related to be all that you can be, is all based on this idea of it's a psychosocial field.

[65:35] One that's increasingly popular is the idea of my mindfulness. You guys are familiar with mindfulness? Okay. There's no standard definition of mindfulness, but psychology today just gives you a nice little definition of features.

[65:51] Mindfulness is a state of active, open attention on the present. When you're mindful, you observe your thoughts and feelings from a distance without judging them good or bad.

[66:03] Instead of letting your life pass by you, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to experience. Is that familiar? Does that seem like the end of every movie that you ever watch or every show that you watch?

[66:22] Is that ultimately, unless somebody gets killed in a shock, somehow people are finding themselves and there coming to a fuller understanding of who they are and now can live a happier life?

[66:39] That's what this is. There are two basic assumptions in this field. The goal is progress through some form of self-effort.

[66:50] So this is not the therapist as one who is pulling out from you based on expertise. The bad stuff so that you can adapt and no longer deal with the bad stuff.

[67:03] This is, you've got a lot of good in you. How can I help the good come out? What can we do to get rid of the bad and help the good? The good is the natural thing. The good is what should flow out of you.

[67:19] The goal is progress through some form of self-effort. I can't do it for you. And so the therapist who's more in the psychosocial field is more of a coach. They're more of somebody who is going to come alongside make sure that you feel good about yourself.

[67:34] Make sure that you feel like you're all you can be. Help you deal with negative thought patterns. Help you embrace positive thought patterns.

[67:45] Those kind of things. So who are we in this world? There's a spirituality that can be inherent in many places.

[67:55] Eventually when you're in the world of this psychosocial, there's some acknowledgement, there's a spiritual dimension. There's something bigger. Because something bigger is almost entirely benevolent and almost entirely for you.

[68:11] It could just simply be the cosmos. I was on a tour one time and the tour guy comes in Italy and kept talking about, let's just thank the cosmos.

[68:24] It's a beautiful view. and I'm like, who, who, who, you know. Or let's just be thankful. Like, if you think about it, what we need in this world is more thankfulness.

[68:38] To who? Thankfulness requires an object. But in this field, thankfulness is its own. Let's just love. Loving self, you've got to love yourself, that's the language of this field.

[68:56] In a fundamental sense, the truth is within each of us. Humanity is a reality of untapped potential toward which each person should strive and which social structures should support.

[69:07] So, our social structures, our laws, everything should support this kind of experiential human flourishing, be all you can be. What's wrong with us?

[69:18] Our greatest problem is the personal, interpersonal, and societal constriction on our ability to achieve our full potential. The goal of full potential was keeping us from that. What should be right with us?

[69:31] The operative historical concept is often called self-actualization, that's Maslow. Living at the fullest possible capacity to which we can strive. This is not about selfishness because in most of these, in the way they're understood, there's a not only living, the more you live good for yourself, the more you live good for other people.

[69:53] The better a person you are, the more you'll be more beneficial to other people. Positive self-esteem and confident self-expression are also worthy goals.

[70:10] what would it take to fix the problem that we have? All of us have the capacity for change through repatterning of thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors, and the removal of negative factors which restrict our potential.

[70:24] So, something like, well, you know what, you're surrounded by toxic people. So, the problem is toxic people that are affecting who you can be. You need to limit, you need to create boundaries to keep yourself from being affected by toxic people.

[70:39] That's all the psychosocial field. You're fine, you've just got to remove the negative factors in your life. We are our own change agents. They require guides or therapists.

[70:54] The goal of any therapy is empowerment to personal change. So, where do you see this around you? If you work at a company, you're going to see it in the human resource department.

[71:18] That's where it's there. Where else do you see it? Just in general, I feel like motivation. Yeah, motivational speaking.

[71:30] Yeah, those kind of things. You are doing great in real time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. my son, he has a company, I still don't understand the model, but it's working for him, but he develops the content for influencers, right?

[71:45] So, an influencer will hire and then he'll develop the content. He'll film them, he'll do these things and he'll talk to videos and that kind of stuff for him. And, and, he would tell you, he said, man, everybody wants to be an influencer.

[71:59] Everybody, everybody wants, they don't have any, they haven't done anything, but they don't want to, but they still want to tell people what to do. Because they're appealing this idea that I can make money by making people feel better about themselves.

[72:14] Or make them feel more productive. And so that's a big part of influencing, is a big part of this world now. What else? this is actually where if you go to a counselor these days, you will probably find this is the dominant orientation they come in with.

[72:43] Because you don't need a PhD to do this. It's good to have training. if you're licensed, that's kind of the most things you need to be licensed, but you don't need to have a PhD.

[72:57] You don't need to understand a lot of the underlying theories. You just have to be good with people, know how to help people, know how to relate to people. That's why many people go to counseling for years, but you don't see a lot of change because the counseling becomes their, it's paid friendship, right?

[73:14] It's the idea that this person helps me feel better about myself. And counseling is how do I help this person feel better about myself. And it'll frustrate some counselors because I feel like I can't, once I begin to press on change, then I didn't know I don't want change, I just want to feel good about myself.

[73:32] I need somebody to hear me, listen to me, and help me to think better about myself. I have a little footnote in here, I'll just share it, but you can read it, but I'll just share it.

[73:43] In this, 70s through the 90s, self-esteem was the dominant concept in popular psychology.

[73:56] We need self-esteem, kids need self-esteem, we all need self-esteem. I think there were, I think the footnote says there were like 15,000 studies done on self-esteem out of which this idea self-esteem is essential to human flourishing.

[74:19] One of the founders of the self-esteem movement, and it got very popular, you couldn't read books that weren't self-esteem books, and maybe you're familiar with it now, maybe you're going to cross it now, but one of the founders began to question some of the tenets of self-esteem.

[74:33] It seemed like it sort of fit everything. He helped develop a macro study, and they looked at these 15,000 studies, and out of those 15,000 studies, only 200 were academically reliable.

[74:53] The rest of them failed on the basis of academic rigor. And of those 200 studies that passed showed no distinction between high and low self-esteem in any category performance.

[75:07] And self-esteem actually made no difference what's the factor in how somebody functioned in life. this kind of world is very subject to those kind of fads.

[75:19] You'll see those. What tends to happen, and we'll talk about it later on, is something becomes popular and is popularized in a therapeutic way, and then books get written about it, and those books over promise.

[75:33] So if you look at, if you Google, if you look at books, you'll see things dominate in the therapy world that prove to be ultimately fads.

[75:46] It's great in the history of that. So before we close out this session, just a bit of history, I just want to show you kind of how these, there's not a linear progression in the world of psychology in terms of the different theories and how they function.

[76:07] They really kind of flow with culture. So in the late 19th century, psychobiology emerges at the basic of psychology. That's the first, this idea that it's all physicality. Turn of the century, we saw that psychosocial field, Freud, a brief ascendancy connected to modernism.

[76:26] Teddy Roosevelt was the archetype of the human potential movement. There's actually, in Great Britain, the Victorian man was a big thing to this idea that there's a certain way of understanding manhood in the Victorian culture.

[76:41] It was built in this self-promotion model. Roosevelt was the archetype for what happened in America, what people were aspiring to.

[76:52] Early 20th century, coming out of World One, American soldiers in particular coming back with what now is classified as PTSD, shell shock, you saw Freudianism really applied to that.

[77:11] Psychoanalysis, 30s and 40s, psychosocial field reemerges because psychoanalysis just too, it takes too much training to do and it's too expensive. So what does the average person do?

[77:22] Then you get these lower level theories that are more mainstream for people. Biology reemerges in the 50s with experimentation and electroshock therapy, drug therapy, and surgical lobotomy.

[77:37] Those are big in the 50s, the 60s. It's amazing how many Hollywood stars in the 50s were getting shock therapy because they didn't afford it.

[77:52] Psychoanalysis reemerges because they find ways to do it in a more short-term way and problem-specific. 70s to 90s psychosocial therapies, CBT, and then pop psychology develops mass self-esteem and self-help therapies.

[78:11] 2000 to 2020, psychobiology dominates. That's the whole medical field we've talked about. Developing trends, I think that we've seen a generation of mental health issues addressed as biological problems in the medical model, and now it's taking some hits.

[78:29] I think we're moving a bit away from a medical model. Long-term use of psychopharmacology is starting to show limits to effectiveness because it just stops working, and permanent negative side effects in long-term patients.

[78:47] Some basic mental health issues like depression and anxiety are proving to be stubbornly resistant to medical treatments alone. the tendency of drug manufacturers to oversell efficiency is now an established fact, so drug manufacturers way oversell.

[79:04] If you ever see an ad for a drug related to mental health issues, the list of negative side effects is frightening with those drugs.

[79:20] because frankly, most drugs that are marketed for psychopharmacology weren't developed for psychopharmacology. That's a secondary benefit of the drug.

[79:33] another factor with the field is that pharmacology, I mean, it's like you're looking in pharmaceuticals, but you don't tend to develop, put a lot of money into drugs that you can't have confidence that you're going to have a good use in it.

[79:53] It's going to make money. And the reason that psychopharmacology is mostly coming from drugs created for something else is because they're looking for other uses for things and there's some benefit to them because nobody's going to invest a lot of money in a depression drug when they don't know the underlying causes of depression and don't know how to treat it and don't have any consistency.

[80:18] And over and over and over again, with depression drugs in particular, the placebo is as equally effective as the drug. So, and then studies are showing that the personal choice and lifestyle decisions of people can mute or even undermine the effectiveness of medication alone.

[80:43] You may have seen this on universities where the amount of Ritalin people are taking. Do they eat Ritalin? No. They have a lifestyle that they want to undergird with Ritalin.

[80:58] That's what's tending to happen with medications. They're not being, they're being used and then lifestyle. So you have Ritalin and you have drinking. You have depression medication and you have drugs.

[81:12] And so, so it's very difficult to know what the underlying problems are. So, I just don't think you're going to see medication. There's not going to be anything driving medication as a universal cure.

[81:26] After the pandemic, one of things interesting and we'll talk a little about popular language of social identity and politics these days, trauma, oppression, empowerment, diversity, equity, inclusion, validation, self-care, et cetera, has been grafted whole cloth into the mental health world.

[81:46] This is really more needs-based psychosocial model. In other words, what's happening, one of the things you're seeing now is that I have these struggles, not because of a personal experience, but because of a class experience.

[82:05] Because this is who I am connected to, this is who I'm identified with, and I'm sharing that experience. It doesn't mean that there isn't something valid to that, but then you take these terms, which we'll talk about later, and you apply them to what is a class experience, regardless of my personal experience, and you claim victimhood in that experience, and now you have a need for certain things to resolve that.

[82:38] That's what's happening now. It's a psychosocial reaction that really began post-pandemic. two points, and we'll take any questions you guys have.

[82:51] Key point number one, most therapists do not ascribe to a school of psychology. I just gave you three, they don't ascribe to them. They are practitioners in the field of mental health and emotional health, and they will use whatever therapeutic approach they feel will work.

[83:06] They will not reference these schools, not if they're not familiar with them, not if they haven't encountered them in school, but they don't come out married to a particular field. The fact that the tenets underlying these, which is what we're talking about today, are very contradictory, means that it's very difficult to coherently connect these theories into coherent therapy, but people attempt to do it, and what you wind up with is sort of a mishmash of self-understandings that people have.

[83:39] It can be very confusing for people because the messaging is very different, even from session to session. Number two, we must, and the reason we're talking about it, we need to be able to interact with the world and practice of psychology without integrating the worldview and practice of psychology.

[84:01] We need theological discernment. The reason we're talking about this today, and the reason I care so much about people, even if they're thinking I'm not going to go into counseling, is because this is the world you minister in, this is the world you live in.

[84:16] Do you understand, has this affected your understanding of yourself and your problems? Do you need to take a second and look and say, where did I get that from? This understanding of myself, do I know that it's come from somewhere?

[84:32] It fits, it feels right, different. But is it coherent? Is it really what I need to understand? Is it conflicting with what I really believe?

[84:45] I see so many Christians who live in this perpetual struggle between what they feel about themselves and what they say they believe. Because what they feel about themselves is diametrically opposed to what they say they believe and they don't know.

[85:03] And so if we're ministering to people, this is the focus of the next two sessions, we're going to have to understand that people live in this tension between what the world tells them about themselves, what they provide, their self understanding, even the language that they use to self describe.

[85:22] So the Bible, God's word and the gospel don't hit opposition through ignorance. So that's it. If you take a break, any questions?

[85:34] about that. We're going to get a little more street level in the office. I have a question.

[85:48] Do you think it's wrong for a Christian to study psychology with the purpose of becoming a psychologist? No. No, I don't. I think a Christian needs, I'm dealing, I'm meeting with a guy right now who's doing that.

[86:02] I think a Christian needs to be well, he needs to be theologically grounded or she needs to be theologically grounded so that they understand how to interpret it. Now to do a psychology degree, it's been in a secondary environment, you're going to have to be able to use the language that is used and demonstrate competency over the concepts that are there.

[86:27] can you do that without drawing them into your life? Can you do that without so I think we're I would say yeah, but you really need alongside this is what we're talking about to see other guys doing this, you can't stop studying theology to study psychology because it will influence you because you'll have to live in that world.

[86:51] And the problem with vocabulary is vocabulary is very identity shaped. So if I'm living in a world where all the vocabulary goes this way, I'm going to start using that vocabulary to describe myself in my world.

[87:05] And if I'm with people who are totally imbibing, the reason I think you can do it is the higher level you go, the more challenging it is because if you're trying to get a PhD then you're going to have to defend a paper.

[87:18] You're going to have to defend a dissertation. You better be really good at what you do because you're not going to be conviction driven by. Most people who do dissertations, they select a topic but they have some sense of vested interest in that topic.

[87:34] Can you find a topic that is acceptable in an academic setting that you may or may not have a commitment to? Some people do. But you have to really, and you're going to be in a world where like any world these days, it's going to be, you're going to find, it's going to be an assaulting world.

[87:52] So I think you can, I think if you're going to be a licensed counselor, you're licensed therapist, I think you can do that as a Christian. Again, you're going to have challenges with licensure and what you need to be able to be okay with, what you can talk about, what you can't talk about, how do you do.

[88:11] And most Christians I know who are therapists, they find the biggest limit is I know what they really need, but unless they ask me, I can't tell them.

[88:24] You know, my license doesn't want me to impose that for me. So those are the challenges, but those are challenges you're going to face in the legal world if you go for a law group.

[88:36] Same kind of thing. Just curious to hear your opinion, and maybe this ties more with application, the later parts, I've noticed a tendency growing up that in the church setting, like when I was growing up, I felt that if someone had a problem in church, they would consult their pastors first.

[89:04] Sure. But now there's this change where when people have problems, they go to their counselor first. Yeah. And what is your personal perspective on this dynamic, this shift?

[89:16] Well, it's interesting. I'm going to take your exact language. They go to their counselor first. The question is, when did they get the counselor and what's the counselor doing?

[89:29] Yeah. Right? Is the counselor essentially that guy for me? So, I talk with a lot of secular counselors and therapists and they will tell you one of the frustrating things about their job is how people get cured from whatever the problem is as soon as insurance runs out.

[89:58] Right? So, as long as insurance is paying for something, I need you. Once I have to pay for it out of pocket, I think I'm okay. So, if someone has an ongoing counselor, the question is what is that person functioning in.

[90:10] It could be beneficial, it could be, so I'm not saying it isn't. So, I don't like to pitch pastor against counselor. I think there's roles that can be played, but I wouldn't want you to go to pastor as if they're a therapist either.

[90:26] That's not their role. And I wouldn't want you to go to therapists as if they're the pastor. I think they both can have a role, but I think understanding what role you're asking them to play is good.

[90:37] One of my problems that I face is when someone is going to a counselor on a regular basis and they want to talk to me, I have to sort of say, we need to decide who's taking a lead on this.

[90:49] Because if you really feel like your counselor's most helpful, I don't want to say things that complicate, but what would really be helpful is I understood it, let's all work together. you know, when something lists, you know, and they can sign a release and the counselor can talk to me, I'm really working with them on this, right, that's good to know.

[91:10] The counselor may say, listen, can you cover this? They seem to have problems in relation in the church. Can you help them think through that? And you can actually work collegially together. I don't like when people, if someone just kind of goes to the counselor or pastor, they tend to find the one that says what they want them to say.

[91:28] And that's not going to be helpful for people. So I think you can do it, but you have to be careful not just kind of who's going to say what I want.

[91:43] And so it's really helpful to have those three categories and then just go through that in terms of the historical development. But I'm also just noticing there are partial truths in them, which is what makes it difficult to discern.

[92:01] Like in the whole psycho, I guess, biology field, we are integrated dualities, right? There are bodies and souls together. So our bodies do matter.

[92:14] And then there's in the whole psychosocial aspect of it, we are called to speak the truth and love to each other. We are called to speak to our souls, address our souls.

[92:24] And what we do does matter. It does, yeah. It's just that there's, but then it just takes it too far or it doesn't go far enough.

[92:35] It's like there's all these things that controvert the biblical truth because of the direction it goes. So do you have any suggestions for, because for someone who's not delving deeply into seeing the primal goo that you're coming in, how can they grow in discernment at the street level?

[93:00] Are there resources for like, here's like the typical vocabulary, and how that's actually shaping the way we think and shaping our identities. Here's how you should be processing the book.

[93:10] Is there anything like that? Well, Truman's book, and he actually published a version that's more of a reader friendly version, is a great book to understand this because he gets underneath that.

[93:22] He's particularly talking about gender and sexuality. It applies to this as well. Part of the reason, and we'll get to this in the next session, these are all reflective, kind of like art is reflective of human experience in various ways.

[93:45] And in any kind of human art creation, even if it doesn't appeal to the eyes, speaking to something of common human experience. So we should expect all of these to in some sense come from that.

[94:00] I think the key is where is God? If God is absent or if God is a problem or if God is a pathology, then you've got real problems trying to take it.

[94:16] the problem with what they call integration is integration tends to want to say, well, here's what we believe as Christians. There's some good things in psychology. Let's bring them in.

[94:28] But who selects what's good and what's not good? What's the criteria for that? And to what extent do you bring it in? And to what extent do you bring the language in with it?

[94:42] So you start using unbiblical or non-biblical language to address human problems. I'm not a big fan of oh, that's an unbiblical language. I don't like throwing flags.

[94:54] We'll talk about how I would tend to do it. But we have to be careful because there's an underlying theology. If I use it, it's the same with capitalism.

[95:06] People would say capitalism is the most consistently understandable from a biblical worldview. Free enterprise. People say that.

[95:18] Good point. But what's capitalism really doing? It's a Bible fittest. And so we have to be careful with any of these systems or structures created outside the Bible trying to fit it into our biblical worldview to create a synthesis.

[95:38] We want to make sure we stay biblical so we can relate to these things accurately. But here's the other one. All these things, who are we?

[95:50] That's not there. What's our problem? Totally different. What should we be? None of these things have room for eternity. All problems deal with, they must be dealt with before death.

[96:04] The nature of suffering, suffering in all these, has no eternity. Suffering has no value in all of these. In many eastern cultures, suffering has tremendous value.

[96:21] In Hinduism, suffering has tremendous value. In western culture, suffering has no value at all. But why? Because we can find ways to minimize it. suffering.

[96:32] So we have no cultural understanding of the value of suffering. But all of these are saying that's the way it should be. You should not suffer. Suffering in itself is pathological.

[96:45] So we have to be careful what we do because there's underlying assumptions about who we are, what's wrong with us, what should be right with us, how we get there, that we're trying to be right. Okay.