Christian Psychology
32
all, is simply one kind of TP. As a result, my funda-
mental response to theistic psychology and to this essay
is overwhelmingly positive. However, the dialogical
format of
Christian Psychology
provides me an oppor-
tunity to think through issues that can help Christian
psychology make the best use of TP and perhaps could
help enhance the contribution that TP can make both
to Christian psychology and mainstream psychology, in
the future.
As postmodernists have argued, humans have a
tendency to be totalizing in their understanding of
reality, resulting in other approaches to understanding
being rejected as false. Christianity, of course, was a
prime example of such totalizing ever since it became
the culturally dominant worldview in the West after
Constantine, and there continue to be plenty of Chris-
tian examples of that tendency out and about. That is
undoubtedly due to the Christian belief that Chris-
tianity is universally true, an assumption basic to its
orthodox variations. However, the canonical faith of the
Hebrew and Christian Scriptures also knew itself to be
counter-cultural, sectarian, and necessarily subversive to
the established order, because of its doctrine of original
sin and sin’s noetic (and carditive) effects, and because
of its role as a medium of divine revelation. This means
that while believing the Christian worldview to be the
truest one, Christianity has, over the centuries, also
increasingly recognized that it must co-exist with other
worldviews and that Christians must work respectfully
with other worldview adherents in common cultural
tasks. Foremost among the reasons for this growing
non-totalizing flexibility is its, not always well-under-
stood, assumptions that images of God must believe in
God freely and must not be—indeed, cannot be—co-
erced into true faith. As a result, canonical Christianity
functions within a paradoxical space: embracing a faith
with universal aims revealed by the one Triune, Creator
God who should be shared with others
dialogically
,
that is, respectfully and lovingly. Moreover, an ongoing
self-critical reflexivity would seem to be intrinsic to a
religion that is based on the martyrdom of its founder
who was killed by that religion’s most devoted followers.
So canonical Christianity affirms that Christ is
the Truth while living in repentance of its own sinful
tendency to totalize. Maintaining such a complex stance
is always easier when Christianity exists as a minority
intellectual community. One of its challenges in the
present is to point out the totalizing agenda of late
modernism without sounding like it is just due to sour
grapes, that is, to Christianity’s loss of cultural hege-
mony to late modernism.
Paramount to this task is helping late modernists
recognize their own coercive discourse and practice
requirements currently imposed upon all participants in
the public square, which, by virtue of its majority status
and totalizing tendency, it has “taken over.” To be fair,
its stance has been difficult to recognize as a problem,
because of late modernism’s minimalist metaphysics,
allied as it is with naturalism and neo-positivism, as
well as its own significant “legitimization” advantages.
Modernism seems so legitimate, because it seems to be
the hallmark of universality and fairness. What could
be more fair than requiring that all intellectuals only
make reference to natural objects using methods and in
ways that can be agreed upon by all “objective, inter-
ested parties” (meaning, those without a very elaborate
metaphysic beyond belief in the natural order and in
the possibility of understanding it)? While humans may
not all be able to agree about the nature of everything
(metaphysics), surely they should be able to agree about
the appearance of the natural order and the proper
methods for determining that. As a result, late modern-
ism also comes across as reasonable and humble.
Nonetheless, postmodernists and other minority
intellectual communities like the Christian know that
there is more to the story than this. For one thing, its
success has been due, at least in part, to the fact that it
is simply easier to achieve consensus regarding natural
objects than supernatural. At the same time, as many
philosophers (Goetz & Taliaffero, 2008; Nagel, 2012;
Craig & Moreland, 2003) have begun pointing out,
pure naturalism is no more necessarily true than any
other worldview system—we all (unfortunately?) live in
a world in which the most trivial matters are the easiest
to prove and the most significant and momentous the
most difficult. Hence, modernism too needs to learn to
repent of its own totalizing agenda. The question is, can
any system learn such reasonableness and true humility
while still being in the majority?
Theistic psychology (TP), in my opinion,
is the best current attempt to successfully mount an
intellectual challenge to the hegemony of modern
psychology. Christians in the field, therefore, ought to
be thrilled about the (admittedly limited) hearing that it
has begun to receive. So, as I indicated in my first para-
graph, rather than simply express my enthusiasm for TP,
I will use the rest of my response to raise some questions
about TP in order to help refine it.
An early sign of problems to come is a fuzziness
with regard to what a worldview is. No definition is
offered at the beginning, and much that follows builds
on the original vagueness. This lack of clarity, in turn,
obscures some of the valid points being made in the
authors’ analyses of “Worldview Dualism” and “World-
view Interdependence.” The goals of these analyses
are, first, to criticize what they call the “conventional”
(majority) approach in contemporary psychology to
the relation between naturalism and theism in psy-
chology, that sharply distinguishes them and favors
naturalism; and, second, to argue, on the contrary, that
these worldviews are actually closely interrelated and
mutually influential. In support of the first goal, they
reject the following conventional assumption: “Separa-
bility is the idea that theism and naturalism constitute
