In this episode, pastors Derek and Cliff discuss how the Enlightenment set the stage for the development of modern psychology as an alternative to Christianity in the realm of soul care.
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Transcript
Derek: Welcome to the With All Wisdom podcast, where we are applying biblical truth to everyday life. My name is Derek Brown and I’m Pastor and Elder at Creekside Bible Church in Cupertino, California, and I’m here today with Cliff McManis. He is pastor-teacher at Creekside Bible Church, and we are both professors of theology at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary in Vallejo, California, just north of us. And here today, we want to delve into part three of our talk on biblical counseling, and we’re going to take a walk through history and consider the history of psychology and the biblical counseling movement. But before we get to our topic, I just want to point you again to withallwisdom.org, where you’ll find a large and growing collection of audio and written resources that are all specifically aimed to help you grow in the Lord Jesus. Everything is rooted in Scripture and we trust those will be helpful to you. So we just point you to withallwisdom.org to find some helpful resources in your walk with Jesus. So let’s turn to our topic. Cliff, I wanted to kick things off today by turning to the Bible, specifically Colossians chapter two, because I think we’ll find in this passage, in verses one through eight, some helpful guidance from the Apostle Paul about how to think about truth claims that we hear out in the world. And this is especially relevant in light of our study of biblical counseling, because inevitably, when we talk about biblical counseling, we have to talk about psychology and what that means.
And Paul gives us some helpful guidance here in this passage about how to think when people are engaging with the big questions of life, the things that are most important, spiritual issues, issues related to what will later see, the psyche, the soul, and the mind. They can look at those things from one of two ways. You can look at those things through God’s revelation in Christ, or you can look at those things apart from God’s revelation in Christ. And Paul has something to say about that, and he gives us this instruction. He gives the Colossians this instruction. The Colossians had a particular false teaching that was encroaching on that church, perhaps agnostic teaching that said, you need to have some special knowledge that only these elite philosophers could provide you to have true spiritual fullness. And Paul had to remind them that you only need Christ, for in him are found all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And that’s starting in verse three. So that’s where I’m going to begin. And we’re going to begin in verse one, so you can get the context and we’ll focus on verses three and four, and then we’ll jump down to verse eight. So I’ll start in verse one. It says, for I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you, and for those in Laodicea, and for all those who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance and understanding of the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments, for though I am absent in the body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and firmness of your faith in Christ. He says in verse six, therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits or principles of the world, and not according to Christ. I just want to point out a couple of things there. Paul makes it clear that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Christ. You don’t need to go anywhere else for wisdom and knowledge. They are all bound up in Christ, which is an implicit, if not an explicit, indication of Christ’s deity. For the one who has all wisdom and knowledge must be, by definition, God. So Paul is reminding the Colossians that this claim by these elite philosophers and these elite teachers—that you need some sort of secret wisdom and knowledge that only they have—well, he refutes that by saying, actually, all that you have, all that you need for true spiritual fullness, is already in Christ. And he says this because there was the possibility of being deluded or deceived by plausible arguments. And I just find it interesting that he says plausible arguments, because it’s not as though these things looked patently foolish or ridiculous. They were plausible, and Paul did not want them to be carried away by things that appeared to be plausible. And I want to keep that in mind as we go through today’s brief history of psychology and the biblical counseling movement. But then in verse eight, he says very explicitly, this is a command that Paul gives. This is a command to Christians. You need to take care. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy. Well, what does he mean by philosophy? Well, he goes on to say an empty deceit. According to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits or principles of the world, and not according to Christ. What he’s referring to is any kind of ruminating over the important issues of life, any kind of rumination or reflection upon spiritual things, things of the soul, things of life, things of that have to do with the most important issues of life, salvation, God, our responsibility towards him, any kind of rumination over those things and teaching on those things that is apart from God’s revelation in Christ.
That’s what he says when he says in that last race and not according to Christ. There’s a kind of thinking and reasoning about the things of this life that’s not according to Christ. And if you begin without Christ and His revelation, you’ll come to certain conclusions that are not in accord with true wisdom, and you’ll apply those solutions to people’s lives, and you’ll teach in a way and say that these things are true there. They’ll appear plausible, according to Paul. But Paul commands the believers to not be taken captive by this kind of thinking or reasoning that is deficient of relying upon God’s revelation in Christ. And that will be relevant, as I think we walk through this brief history of psychology and the biblical counseling movement, and I found it to be helpful for myself to see the origins of modern psychology, where it came from, what it was based on, and to see how there is a departure from biblical truth and a kind of development of a philosophy, you might say, or a way of thinking that is apart from Christ in His Word. Any thoughts about this passage, Cliff, before we take a step into this path down the history of psychology and the biblical counseling movement?
Cliff: Yeah. As pastors—I mean, Paul’s being a pastor here. He’s warning his people in Colossians 2:8, and this resonates with me and you. We’re pastors. So we need to do this. We need to warn our people in our church or our churches that we pastor of this very thing. It’s a command. It’s a warning. And the fact that Paul is actually warning the Christians and the church at Colossae to not be taken captive by people who have wrong thinking, implies that they probably had Christians there in Colossae who were being taken captive. They were buying into the philosophy of the world. Right? Wisdom of the world that was in contrast to the wisdom that Christ provides in his divine revelation. So this is probably going to be true in every church throughout history, all the time. And we’re always going to have to contend with this. So we will have believers in our midst who want to grow in the Lord, who listen to our Bible teaching, and at the same time continue to struggle with being taken captive through deceivers.
Derek: That’s a good point.
Cliff: Smart people, supposedly educated people, scientific people, people who have those esoteric, secret answers to solve your problems that the pastor doesn’t have the answer. He’s not a specialist in the area of psychology or psychiatry. That’s exactly what Paul is saying here. Watch out. This is deceptive. This so-called wisdom. He calls it wisdom philosophy, but it’s wisdom from the world. So it’s not wisdom at all. It’s not true wisdom. It’s false pseudo wisdom. And then that beautiful verse you read in verse three where true wisdom comes from God only through Christ and through His Word in Scripture. So that’s the first thing is, we’ve got to deal with this. And this is our third episode on biblical counseling. And some people might be asking, well, why are you doing biblical counseling again? And my answer is, we need to keep hammering away on this issue, because it’s so prevalent. And at the same time there’s so much confusion about it. It’s hard for people to grasp what the implications are here. And people like you and I who believe in biblical counseling. We’re in the minority. And we are swimming upstream. Sometimes it’s like banging your head on a rock because you talk to people about this and you give them the truth. We’ve already laid out that scripture is sufficient. I mean, most Christians will agree with that—that the Bible is sufficient. And then we define what biblical counseling is. And they even agree with our definition. And then they’ll turn around and then they will imbibe and embrace the very thing we’re warning them of. And that’s a false wisdom from the world. This psychology. And another point I wanted to make here is you’re reading Colossians 2:8, which is kind of as a basis of what you want to talk about here, Derek. Watch out for false philosophy. And we’re going to be talking about the dangers of psychology today. So are you saying that psychology is a philosophy?
Derek: Yeah, it is a worldview.
Cliff: That’s I was going to ask you. Can you define it in a nutshell? And why psychology is considered a philosophy?
Derek: So I would say philosophy—etymologically, it means the love of wisdom. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? Christians should love wisdom. But in terms of the history of philosophy, philosophy is the thinking about the big issues of life, the big questions of life, thinking about life from a perspective that prioritizes human reason, and that doesn’t lean on the revelation we have from God. And psychology is a philosophy, a way of thinking about the world applied to people’s problems.
Cliff: Yeah. As a matter of fact, that word “philosophy”—and this might help believers. Colossians 2:8. Usually when you see the word philosophy in the New Testament, it’s bad. 1 Corinthians chapter one, and here Colossians 2:8. As a matter of fact, it’s probably always bad when it’s in the New Testament. So you could literally, after philosophy, put love of worldly wisdom. Wisdom of man. Finite, fallen wisdom. That’s what he’s talking about. That way we can have clarity, because some people will take you to task and say, oh, all philosophy is not bad. No, that’s not what we’re talking about. Right? We’re talking about man-made, human, fallen, sinful, counterfeit wisdom that competes with the truth of Christ. That’s what Paul is condemning. A false worldview, like you said. And the word psychology, that’s helpful. It’s a compound word, and it means really the study of the soul or soul care. And these are guys, supposedly that are experts on the soul. And I’m thinking, no, there’s only one expert on the soul, and that’s God. And the Bible talks about the soul and care for the soul. And that’s where we should be looking. What does God have to say about care for the soul, and the deepest inner recesses of a human being and all that that entails? He is the expert.
Derek: Well, I appreciate you bringing up the etymology of the word psychology, because that’s exactly where I want to take it. The word simply means a study of the soul. And so that’s something that Christians have always been doing and should be exceedingly interested in doing, because this is the purview of Scripture. This is what God’s revelation is about—about the soul, who we are, how we’re made. Our composition is body and soul. And so it’s helpful to do that. It’s helpful to bring that out, because we want to be clear that this is something that Christians have always done, and that’s something that Christians should be doing. Actually, though, the word “psychology” has a modern connotation. Today, if you just step back and understand it broadly and the connotation it has in our modern society, it really is a naturalistic scientific discipline with a popular self-help practice that is derived from this alleged scientific foundation. And so what we have to do is we have to step back and ask, where did this all begin? Where did it all start? Where did psychology come from? And this ties back to what we were talking about in Colossians chapter two. We need to understand where these plausible arguments came from, their origin, the root of these things. And as we’ve noted, you know, I think it’s helpful if we step back for a minute and just realize that people have always been thinking about the issues of life, the issues of the soul, the inner person of who we are, even if they’re not articulated that way.
People throughout time have reflected on these things because we are made in God’s image. And even if you are in a nation that was not Israel and you did not have God’s revelation, you’re a next-door neighbor or a nation next to Israel, and you did not have the special revelation that God gave Israel. You still were thinking about these issues, the issues of life, the issues of afterlife, the issues of soul and behavior and what constituted right behavior and so on. That’s just because we’re made in God’s image. When you turn to the New Testament or the Old Testament, rather, you do find God’s people are reflecting upon the soul. And you see this in the Psalms. You see it with David, you see it all throughout. And that makes sense because God has revealed to his people knowledge about who they are, how they’re made, and what their soul is and how to overcome their problems and understand their problems in relation to him. Historically, psychologists like to trace things back to Plato and Aristotle. And this is interesting because they actually disagreed about what the soul actually was. But psychologists and historians like to point back to Plato and Aristotle as the ones who kind of kicked off this real intense study of the soul.
But you can you can really step back and say, actually, this is always been an interest or a reflection point for humanity at large in different ways, and especially in the Old Testament, as you have God’s people reflecting on these things and writing about these things as you transition from the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and as you have more progressive revelation about who we are in relation to God, our dual nature as body and soul, and you have a more intense concern about the soul and how to care for it and how to help people. And this is this is happening in the New Testament as you transition in the New Testament. It’s just very natural. Therefore, as you come out of the New Testament to see that the Christian church, the post-apostolic church, has a concern about a care for the soul. The soul is precious. It is eternal. We have various issues related to sin that we need to overcome. And so the early church has a concern about soul care. And as you make your way throughout church history, you see someone like an Augustine who’s reflecting very heavily on these issues related to the soul, to memory, to feeling, to dealing with problems and how to overcome them.
Augustine, at some level, is dealing with these, as were other notable figures in church history and notable writers. You make your way into the medieval church and you see Thomas Aquinas, who is writing and thinking about issues related to the soul, issues related to behavior, the appetites, the will, and these kinds of important categories of soul care. When you come to the Reformation and the rediscovery of justification by faith and the centrality of the Scripture and the believer’s life, you see the reformers Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others with a deep concern about the soul and how to care for it and how to help people. If you read Calvin’s commentaries and if you read his Institutes, they’re very pastoral and they have this concern over caring for the soul. So this was certainly a just a natural interest for the Christian to the Christian church to consider the soul and how to help people in their inner life, so to speak. And this is especially fruitful in the Reformation and even in the post Reformation theologians, as they’re dealing with these things. An important event, though, in the history of Western thought that we have to all have some understanding of, and it doesn’t matter who you are or how long you’ve been a Christian—you need to understand the enlightenment at some level. Broadly speaking, the enlightenment was a complex of ideas, a movement you could say that is occurring.
Its beginnings are in Europe. The beginnings and all the various facets of it are complex, but you could date it between 1600 to 1800 and you have a change, a revolution in worldview, as some have called it, in Europe. So prior to the enlightenment, you had a reliance upon, by and large (obviously there are anomalies and differences), but by and large you have a reliance upon the church and upon the Word of God and the Bible as sources of authoritative truth and revelation from God that is to be received and would shape your worldview. Well, coming into the 17th century, you have a man—an important person. You need to know Rene Descartes. And he, upon reading someone else who was highly skeptical, realized, listen, we can’t be skeptical like that. We need to have a foundation for the certainty of our knowledge. And so he sets about a project and he says he’s going to apply a methodological doubt. This is his method. He is going to doubt everything. And he doubts and he doubts and he doubts. And then he comes to the conclusion, I can doubt everything. I can doubt absolutely everything. The one thing I cannot doubt is that I’m doubting. And so he explains this as, I think, therefore, I am. That was the phrase he coined out of his experience. I think, therefore, I am. Because I’m thinking I can be certain of my existence.
I can doubt everything except for that. I’m doubting so that I doubt, therefore, I am. I can be certain of my existence. And from that certainty, therefore, Descartes—and Kant would be a later figure—would build from that foundation of certainty other issues, like the existence of God. You could build upon your certainty of your existence. Now you can argue for the existence of God from that foundation, and you can build your structure of knowledge upon this certain foundation of I think, therefore, I am. And this is what historians have called the great turn to the subject, meaning now the subjective person was the one who arbitrated and grounded truth and certainty. So after Descartes, other philosophers argue from different perspectives, like sense perception and Kant will argue slightly differently than Descartes, but nevertheless, reason becomes the arbiter of the subjective. Person becomes the arbiter of truth and certainty. I will determine. I determine what is true. And so this is the turn to the subject. And Immanuel Kant is another important figure. He will say things like this. He will say, have the courage to use your own reason. It’s immature—childish, even—to rely upon external authorities like the Bible and the church. Have the courage to use your own reason. And so these philosophers are having a major influence.
These ideas are really catching on. And these ideas have consequences, as all ideas do. And now, slowly but surely, the dominant thinking begins to be, now in order to think rightly about things and in order to understand the world rightly, we need to read. We reject and not rely upon divine revelation or the church. We need to exercise our own reason. We need to judge revelation by reason. We need to judge truth by our reason. And now the approach to knowledge no longer considers the church, the pronouncements of the church, or the Scripture to be the authoritative revelation from God or a fountain of knowledge that we are to rely upon. Now, what’s happening culturally and socially is that religious speech is respected less and less in the public discourse. It’s being pushed out to the margin as faith is now more and more marginalized as a private belief. Reason now is the determiner of what is true. Faith is something that you are. You believe something, but it’s not classified as true knowledge. Knowledge is grasped through the reason; faith falls in the spiritual realm. They are grasped by faith, but that is not true knowledge. If you want knowledge, then you need to apply your reason. And Thomas Paine in his book The Age of Reason, when he introduces it, he introduces it by saying, I have some opinions on religion and Christianity, namely, and I’m going to give these opinions and I’m going to use my reason because reason is the source that I can use to be able to determine what is true.
He even said it like this. He says, “The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason capital R. I have never used any other and I trust I never shall.” And then he goes on to attack about every single facet of the Bible and every single facet of Christianity, because it does not fit with his unaided reason. Now that he’s thinking apart from and with no reliance upon Scripture or the pronouncements of the church, he is now thinking and he is going to use his reason, and he attacks just about every facet and every aspect of Christianity and the Bible. And so you might be wondering, well, what does this have to do with psychology? Well, we have to keep in mind that psychology is a relatively new study or area of human study. And you have to also keep in mind that people are still thinking about the major issues of life. They’re still thinking about the issues of the soul. But now, by and large, the cultural air that you breathe is that this kind of thinking, if it’s going to lead you to true knowledge, it must be done with the assumption that we cannot rely upon these previously relied upon authorities like the Bible.
And so now thinking about the soul and thinking about people is going to be done primarily from a deistic viewpoint or even a theistic viewpoint, and primarily a naturalistic viewpoint. And so what’s going to happen now is the thinking about the soul and about people’s problems and the big issues of life are going to be handled within a framework that rejects the God of the Bible. And so this is the foundation that that psychology is going to be building on. And then not only that, but now you also have the introduction of Darwinian evolution at this time. This is now going to be in the 19th century, or the 1800s. You have now the development and popularization of Darwinian evolution. And what that’s going to do for the study of the human person is that it’s now going to connect the human person to animals, because remember, Darwin argued for an origin of the human species through a solitary or single ancestor, so that all species and all living things came from one ancestor. That means that you as a human are connected to a previous animal ancestor. This relates to psychology because you can now study the animal and you can gain knowledge about the human.
And so there’s going to be scientific approaches—Darwinian, naturalistic, scientific approaches—now applied to the study of the human person. And I think this is a helpful quote from Eric Johnson. He is a Christian psychologist. He’s an integrationist, and I’ll explain what that word is in a moment. But nevertheless, he recognizes the shift that had now happened with the thinking behind care for the soul. All right. Again, remember, we’re always thinking about care for the soul. But now within this enlightenment culture and these ideas, that thinking is now more and more drifting from a Christian worldview. And he says this, “Along with many other Western intellectuals, most of the leaders of modern psychology and psychotherapy were consciously moving away from the Judeo-Christian religion and became contributors to that movement, including major figures such as Wilhelm Wundt, James Baldwin, GT Ladd, John Dewey, James Angell, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Jean Piaget, Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, B.F. Skinner, and so on.” And so what’s beginning to happen is, and he even says it, is a self-conscious movement away from the Christian or a theistic Christian worldview, and ruminating and reflecting and dealing with issues related to the soul, related to person, people, and their problems in a secular framework.
Wilhelm Wundt, as I already mentioned, is called the father of experimental psychology and is also responsible for what’s called physiological psychology. And according to Wundt, all persons’ psychological processes are rooted in some element of their biology. So we really are getting away from now this dichotomy of the person and of the body and the soul. We’re now thinking primarily in terms of material, and primarily biology. And this makes sense in light of Darwinian evolution. Sigmund Freud, someone you might recognize, is called the founder of modern psychotherapy, trying to apply psychological insights done from scientific studies upon people to now their problems. B.F. Skinner was another important figure in the history of psychology. He popularized and founded behaviorism. And I just want to quote him, because he speaks very explicitly about how he views the human person. He says, “I am nothing but a member of a particular evolved species, and nothing of any kind exists in me. I’ve got to explain everything I do in terms of what will eventually come down to biochemical changes.” And so obviously operating from an evolutionary standpoint, a secular standpoint, and seeking to help people solve their problems from that standpoint. And so what’s happening is in America then, because that’s our setting here in America, you have post-Civil War, a development among the people in America, this idea that it really is this new science of psychology that’s going to provide real help to people and their problems.
And there’s actually a neglect by the church to actually engage with these issues. And I want to read from another person who works in this field, David Paulsen, who actually recently died. He was a biblical counselor, but he actually did work in the history of psychology and in the history of the biblical counseling movement. So he’s got some real insight. And I want to quote him at length here, because I think what he says is very insightful. He says this: “In the century after the Civil War, the professional roles of asylum superintendent, psychological research scientist and charity worker transmuted into a secular psychotherapeutic pastorate. Professional jurisdiction over Americans’ problems in living gradually passed from the religious pastorate to various medical and quasi medical professions—psychiatry, neurology, social work, and clinical psychology. Pastoral retreat and subordination mirrored the advancing authority of those secular professions, offering and administering psychotherapy, psychotropic medication and psychiatric institutions. The therapeutic was triumphant. Psychiatry and psychotherapy displaced the cure of souls, reifying the medical metaphor, and so ordaining the secular pastoral workers to take up the task. Emotional and behavioral ills of the soul that once registered dislocations in a moral agent’s relationship to God and neighbor were re-envisioned as symptomatic of the patient’s mental and emotional illness. Worry, grumbling, unbelief, lovelessness, strife, vicious habit, and deceit came to be seen through different eyes.” That’s a very important phrase. All of those are what we would classify as troubles of the soul and sins of the soul. “They came to be seen through different eyes as neurotic anxiety, depression, inferiority, complex alienation, social maladjustment, addiction and unconscious ego defense. Hospital, clinical and office displaced the church in the community as the locus of cure.” And so what you see happening here, very importantly, is that there is this new change. There is this this new psychology, that’s this modern psychology that is now displacing the church and the pastor and the Christian and the Scripture as the place and the sources of true help for the soul. It’s being replaced now by what he calls a secular pastorate, which I think is incredibly insightful. Things are being seen through different eyes now. The issues of the soul are seen through different eyes. So then you have to come to the question of, if that’s the case, if that’s the origin of psychology, what can we glean from it? What is useful? What is actual true wisdom that we can glean from it? And as we’ll see in our next episode, the founder of the biblical counseling movement, Jay Adams, will say that there really isn’t much, if anything, that we can glean when you are taking these issues from a secular standpoint and framework. You are going to veer off in a very unhelpful, unhealthy direction.
And so he is going to make that argument. But we are going to handle that topic, the development of the biblical counseling movement in another episode. But before I ask Cliff if he has any last comments, I wanted to end my segment with a reference to this article in Wired magazine. And just thinking back to that question I asked, does psychology have anything of value to offer the Christian counselor? I just find the title of this article interesting. It’s dated September 26th, 2022. So very recent from a magazine that is not Christian in any way. The title is “Why Therapy is Broken,” and then the subtitle is “Everyone is telling one another to get help, but few acknowledge that the practice is often flawed,” and that is coming from a resource that is not confessedly Christian, or even trying to make an argument for Christian counseling, but recognizing that there’s something deeply wrong with the modern psychology. And so we want to just highlight that as we ask the question, is there something of value that Christians can glean? Cliff, do you have anything that you would like to add or say as we close out?
Cliff: No, I have a lot of thoughts on that survey of the history of psychology, which there’s a lot there in that the implications are countless. But just to encourage God’s people out there. The way we’re supposed to understand modern psychology today. Secular psychology, as they pass it off, as you said, either as a medical profession or as a science. Yet the Bible warns us. First Timothy 6. I’ll close with this. Verse 20. Paul says to the young Timothy, O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you. What’s that? What did he entrust to him as biblical truth? Protect it. What has been entrusted to you? Avoiding worldly and empty chatter. That’s stuff that comes from this world—from human wisdom and the opposing arguments—of what is falsely called knowledge. But the King James on this says for what is falsely called or falsely passed off as science. That is exactly how we could describe modern day secular psychology. It is a false knowledge. False science. Pseudoscience.
Derek: And this is, again, vital because this is precisely what Scripture is warning us to take. And I think it’s helpful that Paul prefaces it by calling these things plausible arguments. They appear plausible. I mean, you see that in kind of this way people were getting swept up in the modern psychology like, wow, this seems like this has the answers. And of course it would, because it’s a scientific approach. This is a systematic approach to people’s problems. This is something that you can study and know. And it became very plausible. And I think it’s become plausible for many.
Cliff: In other words, it’s believable right on the surface. That’s why it’s so dangerous. I mean, if it wasn’t plausible or believable, people wouldn’t be gravitating towards it. But it’s appealing. And that’s why it’s so deceptive. Hence the warnings.
Derek: Right. Well, we want to thank you for listening to the With All Wisdom podcast. We also want to encourage you to check out withallwisdom.org, where you’ll find audio resources like this podcast, as well as many articles on a host of topics including biblical counseling, but also many others that relate directly to your Christian life. And until next time, keep seeking the Lord in His Word.
