(This article also includes a podcast discussion. Listen on your Apple or Android podcast app.)
We’ve seen that psychology, while having the right intentions, is inherently flawed. It tries to address a being who is both natural and spiritual by only dealing with physical reality. It diagnoses our emotions with no thought to our sin nature, something that God says is a big problem for us. Yet Christians and non-Christians find great success with psychology, so is it really that bad?
A quick note on such a sensitive topic
I want to take a moment to make an important point: I know many Christians who visit psychologists and psychiatrists. They aren’t evil for doing so, nor do I believe they are rejecting Christ for doing so. The topic of psychology is loaded with emotions, sometimes because our anxiety or depression can start to become an ingrained part of our identity. To hear someone say that psychology is somehow lacking can feel like our entire experience is being ignored.
That’s not my goal. Instead, I want us to see that while psychology offers a lot of good, we must ask ourselves if it offers the greatest good. As you read this article, please understand that I’m not trying to attack anyone who believes in the usefulness of psychology. Instead, I want us to see why the primary goal of psychology may be at odds with our true needs as believers.
Where psychology fails us
As Christians, we can’t escape the reality that we are both body and spirit. We also must acknowledge that our spirit isn’t a lesser part of ourselves, but instead has a major effect on our lives. After all, it’s not our bodies that made us enemies of God, but our sinful hearts.
Psychology means well, but the entire science is necessarily rooted in a worldview that hates God. Considering that many of its greatest contributors weren’t followers of Jesus Christ, it really has no choice but to offer explanations of the human condition that are devoid of our divine creator. Yet if we are unable to consider God when we observe that we’re angry, addicted, or fearful, then our diagnosis and treatment of those problems will likewise have nothing to do with Him.
Remember, there’s no denying that our physical bodies can likewise affect our spiritual lives. We have evidence of people with brain tumors or car accident survivors having a drastic personality change, purely due to how their brains were affected. We’ve also seen evidence that medication can help alleviate certain feelings of depression or anxiety. It’s dangerous to outright discount the fact that a person’s feelings may, in fact, be a physical problem.
Yet as I’ll discuss later in this series, that approach is all psychology can offer. Whether it’s based on chemicals or how our thoughts affect us, psychology can do little more than give us a natural explanation for what is so often a spiritual issue. That’s all psychology offered me, and it nearly killed me.
Psychology fails us because it starts in the wrong place and has nowhere to go from there. There’s no doubt that many have found help. Countless people have learned how to cope with certain issues and can live more satisfying lives as a result. Psychology helps people be less anxious, accept themselves, learned to stop drinking, and find ways to cope or avoid so many other harmful thoughts and behaviors.
A certain kind of salvation
Yet in the end, that’s the most it can offer. It can help people feel better now, putting the patient in sole control of how they feel. Many are able to find success, learning methods to make themselves feel better and remove dangerous things from their lives.
Those who visit psychologists want freedom from something. Most psychologists would agree that it’s not the psychologist, but the patient, who is responsible for finding that freedom. A psychologist is merely there to offer guidance and encouragement in that journey, letting a patient draw from their trained expertise.
Psychology, especially in 2019, starts with a simple proposition: Your greatest problem is what you’re feeling. Self-harm can be traced back to our thoughts. Addiction can be traced back to our thoughts. Almost any problem can be broken down into how our thoughts and feelings are leading to our suffering, whether physically or emotionally.
Thus, psychology offers salvation from our feelings. It promises we’ll find joy and satisfaction if we can merely find ways to manage those things that negatively affect us. After all, if our root problem is our thoughts, actions, and emotions, then changing those things means we’re successful. We’re saved from our biggest problem.
Disconnecting our problems from Christ
When we recognize that our goal in seeing a psychologist is freedom and salvation from our thoughts and actions, we realize something else. We’re putting the power of our joy in freedom in the hands of someone who isn’t our true savior. We are putting our trust in someone, whether it’s the psychologist’s ability to help us, or our own ability to overcome those things we don’t like.
Understand that there’s nothing inherently wrong with psychology, those who practice it, or those who seek help from it. As I’ll discuss later, psychology really does have some usefulness to it. The good that psychologists have done simply can’t be ignored.
Yet when we seek worldly wisdom to help us with our problems, Christ can no longer be central to our freedom. We may seek Him daily in prayer, but ultimately there’s no room for Christ and a belief system that removes Him from it.
That’s because one source says we need to feel better to be satisfied and fulfilled, while the other says we can find satisfaction in Jesus Christ no matter what our circumstances may be. We can pursue one of those goals, but it will necessarily be at the expense of the other.
Coming up next
In the end, psychology certainly offers us freedom from suffering. Yet we must ask one question: Are our thoughts and actions really the root of our issues, or just the result of a much deeper problem? Does psychology really help treat the cancer that’s destroying us, or find ways to help us mask the symptoms? We’ll try to answer that in the next article.
