Christian Psychology
21
Commentaries on Jeff Reber & Brent Slife’s “Theistic
Psychology and the Relation of Worldview: A Reply
to the Critics”
Each issue of Christian Psychology begins with a discussion article followed by open peer commentaries that examine
the arguments of that paper. The goal is to promote edifying dialogues on issues of interest to the Christian psycholog-
ical community. The commentaries below respond to Jeff Reber & Brent Slife’s “Theistic Psychology and the Relation
of Worldview: A Reply to the Critics”
Dialogue on Christian Psychology: Commentaries
Definitions and Conversations
Joanna Collicutt
University of Oxford
This paper suffers at the outset from a lack of a clear
definition of its central concern: theistic psychology. It
seems likely that the authors are referring to a psychol-
ogy that can accommodate (an) intentional divine
agent(s) as a proximal cause of human behaviour, either
instead of or in addition to ‘blind’ stochastic processes.
If so, they don’t really spell out in what way or in what
sense the divine agent(s) might act. Is the divine an
external stimulus to which human beings respond?
Or an intrapsychic force? Or a cognitive module – a
kind of psychological analogue to the largely discred-
ited neuroscientific notion of a ‘God spot’? Or is the
divine conceived as a
deus ex machina
who manipulates
intrapsychic activity perhaps via the action of subatomic
particles that form part of human brain chemistry, per-
haps through the subconscious, as suggested by several
psychologists of religion, including William James and
Carl Jung?
The paper neither engages with the question of
definition nor the subsequent questions that a defini-
tion might invite. What it does do is firstly to posi-
tion theistic accounts of the world as in opposition to
natural accounts, and thus appears to rule out all the
above hypotheses. Theistic psychology is presented as
something that invokes the ‘transcendent’ and ‘super-
natural’. Again, neither of these terms is defined, but it
is made clear that their essential characteristic is being
‘not natural’.
The authors claim that the adoption of a dualist
position, in which theistic psychology is set against or
apart from natural science comes not from them, but
from the modernist context in which psychology arose,
developed, and continues to be studied, practised,
and taught. In particular, they cite Helminiak’s (2010)
critique of theistic psychology and psychotherapy as an
example and expression of this modernist context. His
critique characterises theistic psychology as subjective,
departing from a positivist philosophical framework,
and thus unscientific, indicating that his view of ‘main-
stream’ scientific psychology is that it is objective and
based on a positivist world view. This account of scien-
tific psychology as exclusively objective and positivist is
unrecognisable to me (a British academic psychologist
of religion and clinical psychologist). It fails to take into
account the phenomenological, social constructionist,
and hermeneutic approaches within the discipline of
academic psychology, and the burgeoning qualitative
methodologies that are becoming increasing prominent
in postgraduate research projects and published research
papers.
The depiction of psychology as a positivist enter-
prise in which behaviourism dominates can only claim
to be accurate in relation to the USA in the 1960s and
70s It doesn’t do justice to the current field across the
world. Indeed behaviourism never had the dominant
position on mainland Europe even when it was at its
heights in the USA. There hermeneutic approaches
flourished and continue to do so.
More generally, the contemporary natural sciences
are not obviously influenced by positivism (and the
degree to which they ever were is highly contested.)
They show a general tendency to talk of ‘consensus
reality’ rather than ‘objective truths’ indicative of critical
rather than naïve realism, and the provisional nature of
scientific constructs is well recognised. The philosophi-
cal critique that formed the basis of the deconstruction
of positivism was at its height in the third decade of the
twentieth century. For instance Popper’s ‘Logic of sci-
entific discovery’ was first published in 1959, a fact not
evident in this paper, as the authors cite a 2002 edition
of the work.
The authors refer to a second dualism: that be-
tween the world of the scientific academic psychologist
and the world of faith or pastoral psychology. Anecdotal
examples are presented to illustrate the idea that aca-
demic scientific psychology is not open to the influence
of faith traditions. This point seems to me unfounded:
the positive psychology movement has drawn heavily on
