Christian Psychology
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Theism, Truth, Subjectivity & Psychology
William Hathaway
Regent University
I have struggled with the positions that Reber, Slife, and
their colleagues have been taking on the role of theism
in psychology (Slife & Reber, 2009; Slife, Reber, &
Faulconer, 2012; Slife, Reber & Lefevor, 2012). I am a
theist and a Christian psychologist and much appreciate
the suggestion that theism is relevant to the discipline of
psychology in such an explicit manner. Yet the specific
case they make for theistic psychology rests upon certain
premises and perspectives towards which I am not as
favorably disposed. It is also unclear to me exactly what
they would want a theistic psychology to look like once
fully developed. Before proceeding to a direct response
to what I take to be current version of their argument,
let me begin with a digression.
My doctoral research, done at a secular university,
was in the psychology of religious coping with the Jew-
ish psychologist, Kenneth Pargament. While I would
have considered our methodology in those years to be
that of methodological naturalism, my conceptualiza-
tion of the research did not presuppose metaphysi-
cal naturalism. We had numerous discussions in the
research team about what would be the case if God
directly influenced the aspects of human functioning
we were exploring. We included measures that assessed
the degree to which the individuals we were studying
thought this was the case.
The challenge for such research was not only how
to design a methodology that was not excluding a
priori the possibility of the truth of the religious beliefs,
including the existence of God, but also determining
just what it would mean for God to act in a way that
would be discernable to human observers. Unless one
has a conception of divine action that sees such action
as lawfully predictable and yet discontinuous from the
normal operation of the universe, one would not expect
any measured impact from such acts to show up as a
systematic effect. This is the issue that is troubling theo-
logically about the divine intercession studies. While
God does miracles, God is a not a miracle vending ma-
chine that can be predicted to deliver such interventions
in a mechanistic linear way in response to our petitions:
prayers placed in the intercession slot-miracles dis-
pensed to order. Thus, divine miracles that represent a
departure from His ordinary mediated activity through
natural processes would show up, to the extent that
they have an observable impact, in the error variance of
any predictive model. To expect otherwise seemed to
me more akin to the worldview of
magick
than Biblical
theism. God is not controllable by our intercessions in
a linear, predictable manner the way animistic forces
might be susceptible to ritualistic chants or practices on
that worldview’s conception.
I remained convinced, based on my own Christian
theism, that if God was working in some direct manner
with people then such interventions would likely leave
footprints in the sensible world. As an evangelical theist,
I did not believe God, His salvific and providential ac-
tivity, or the experience of the Holy Spirit in a person’s
life was limited to an ethereal gnostic realm that was
observable only to those who were of the initiated elite.
I was also aware that bias could blind us to truth
and lead us to divergent perceptions of the world. That
point seemed to be readily acknowledged by my secular
psychology faculty who taught us about Kuhn and the
sociology of science. These faculty appeared firmly
disabused of any idea that psychological science, or the
natural sciences for that matter, could be bias free. Yet
clearly they felt that, at least for some kinds of questions
about human functioning, the methods of psychol-
ogy were superior to those from the humanities and
religious studies.
We were assigned Darwin’s (1873)
Origin of the
Species
in our second doctoral methodology seminar.
After discussing Darwin’s view of evolution we were
introduced to Donald Campbell’s (1974, 1974b) evo-
lutionary epistemology. The benefit of that approach is
that it did not require bias free perspectives or pristine
objective truth guaranteeing methodologies. Rather, the
evolving investigative activities of psychology were seen
as an advance over those of religious anthropologies, at
