Christian Psychology
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domains. We have already shown that faith traditions
have been influenced by psychological science and have
accommodated many of its findings. But accommoda-
tion is only one form of influence. Psychologists too
have been influenced by traditions of faith, though typi-
cally at an implicit level. The topics that psychologists
in the psychology of religion address, for example, are
saturated by meanings that come from faith traditions
and are not easily separated out from the naturalistic
meanings psychologists adopt (Slife & Reber, 2012).
The psychological construct of forgiveness, for
example, is a concept rife with religious meaning. For
many faith traditions, forgiveness requires a change or
transformation of heart that is facilitated by God in
which vengeful, angry feelings are replaced with feelings
of goodwill and love through God’s grace (Rye, et al.,
2000). Psychological definitions also often entail letting
go of hate and replacing vengeful feelings with posi-
tive emotions toward the offender, albeit without the
assistance of God (e.g., Wade, Bailey, Shaffer, 2005).
This similarity between the religious and psychological
definitions of forgiveness is not merely coincidental.
The religious definition of forgiveness has a long history
in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and it has contrib-
uted to the way psychologists and the people they study
conceptualize forgiveness (Rye, et al., 2000). Psycholo-
gists may offer a secular definition of forgiveness that
is similar to that of religion or is intentionally opposed
to it, but they cannot pretend that they are unaware of
the religious conception of forgiveness as they construct
their own.
Practices like replacing negative feelings with
positive feelings toward an offender, then, are less likely
to be naturally occurring features of forgiveness that
psychologists have simply empirically observed. They
have become inculcated into our way of life by our re-
ligious history so that we now take them for granted as
necessary conditions of any type of forgiveness, includ-
ing a secular form. One wonders whether psychology
researchers would even study forgiveness if the religious
conception of forgiveness did not exist. Would it be
considered an important aspect of psychology? Would
psychologists find evidence of the practice of replacing
malevolent feelings with benevolent feelings toward an
offender if their participants were not also informed by
the traditions of faith that have influenced how people
conceptualize and practice forgiveness with each other?
These and other questions speak to the difficulty of
separating out the concepts, practices, and meanings of
psychological topics and phenomena into a separable
sphere. Our sense of ourselves and our psychology is
already deeply influenced by naturalistic and theistic
meanings which are in turn deeply influenced by each
other, so much so that it is impossible to separate them
into two distinct domains.
What does this say about the two-hats approach
of our professor friend? It suggests that his hats are not
as neatly compartmentalized as he might believe. Each
hat he wears does not represent a distinct worldview but
as we have described already, a worldview in relation,
which depends historically and currently in large part
on other worldviews for its meaning and its qualities.
By not acknowledging this worldview interdependence
there is no way to evaluate the implications of the work
done in the lab on the practices of faith and vice versa.
Psychology and faith are like two ships passing in the
night.
For the hermeneuticist all this means is that
the influence of these worldviews on each other will
take place outside the compartmentalizing psycholo-
gist’s awareness, leading him or her to believe that the
insights, issues, and interpretations that arise in one
context have nothing to do with the other. They are
assumed to emerge, however consciously or uncon-
sciously, from within the worldview itself and not from
the relationship between the different worldviews. This
is strikingly dissimilar from the experience of early sci-
entists like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton for whom
many of the questions they examined scientifically
arose in their study of scripture and who brought new
interpretations to bear on verses of scripture in light of
the results of their scientific research (Hannam, 2011;
Nelson, 2005). For them there was a book of nature
and a book of faith, but those books, though differ-
ent, mutually informed one another and required one
another, not only for a full understanding of truth, but
for a full understanding of each other (Dixon, 2008).
The intricate relationship of theism and naturalism
should not be taken to mean that they are not substan-
tially different. Too often, as Charles Taylor (1999) has
pointed out, people confound similarity and relation-
ship as if things must be similar in order to be related,
just as people often confound difference and indepen-
dence (Bell, 1998). We warn against either tendency
here. Theism and naturalism are very different world-
views
and
they are in an interdependent relationship.
Indeed, we would hold that it is partly because they are
so different that they are and have been so historically
and currently related. This conception of relationship is
itself a key difference between the conventional framing
of worldviews advocated by many critics of a theistic
approach to psychology and the alternative frame we are
describing.
Worldview Difference
When worldviews are understood to be different
frameworks for meanings and not different labels for
objects, they cannot be differentiated in their objectiv-
ity. All involve ideas, and as such involve unproven
assumptions, value-laden beliefs, etc. (Naugle, 2002).
To make a meaningful contribution, each worldview
must share in a valid interpretation of the phenomenon
with “valid” in this case meaning that the interpretation
includes those meanings constituting the worldview
THEISTIC PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELATION OF WORLDVIEWS
