Christian Psychology
50
as irrelevant to psychology. Yes, exactly so. By differ-
entiating which areas of investigation pertain to which
disciplines, I have argued that theology (not the mixed
bag of religion) and psychology deal with different
dimensions of one and the same reality, so they are not
directly in conversation with each other.
However, I have not said religion is irrelevant. I do
not deny the possibility of miracles, the one relevant
issue. Still, I believe they occur rarely, if at all.
Moreover, as is clear from the present exchange—
and unfortunate and disruptive, as well—differences in
other-worldly beliefs often have implications for this-
worldly matters. But as strictly indeterminable, other-
worldly beliefs have no right whatsoever to impose on
this-worldly living. Resolution of this-worldly matters
depends on marketplace determination of the indis-
pensables wherein religion, especially in a pluralistic so-
ciety, can have no privileged voice. Our world would be
much better off if self-assured religious believers learned
this lesson and argued their case on the strength of the
evidence, not on the strength of their beliefs.
Additionally, I do insist on an explicit realm of
competence for theology. For a complete account of
things, for a comprehensive science, theology is neces-
sary (Helminiak, 1987b, pp. 96, 101; 1998, pp. 103-
104; 2011). The reasonable question about existence
is real—Why is there something, rather than nothing?
What accounts for the existence of the things that the
natural and human sciences struggle to understand?
A reasonable question deserves a reasonable answer.
Following classical Western theism, I have articulated
an answer above: God the Creator. This answer coheres
with those of the other sciences by addressing a dimen-
sion of reality that they do not and, thus, by opening
a broader horizon of meaning within which all human
understanding can stand: Human existence has divine
implications. If the competence of theology is specified
as a specialized cognitive contribution to comprehensive
understanding, theology fits hand in glove with the oth-
er sciences. It explains how it is that there is anything
here at all, and the other sciences explain the structures,
mechanisms, processes, and triggers of the things that
we find here. As the early Western scientists Kepler
and Newton explicitly held, they were finally coming
to understand the world that God had created. They
found no conflict to their theist faith in the discover-
ies of their science, and they found no reason to factor
God into their equations to make their science accurate.
They understood theology and science to make different
but complementary contributions to a comprehensive
understanding of human experience.
If such an understanding is viable, the discussion
in this paper is not really about the relationship of
psychology and theism, reason and faith, or science and
religion. It is about different sets of religious beliefs, dif-
ferent claims to infallible revelation, and different the-
ologies, and they are hardly all compatible and hardly
equally acceptable. Attention to this third controlling
ambiguity in Reber and Slife (this issue) shows that the
correctness or incorrectness at stake here regards reli-
gious beliefs, not psychology—but the always presumed
and ever protected correctness of religious beliefs is the
very privilege the theistic psychologists of BYU want
to claim
a priori
. Or, perhaps, they are not concerned
about correctness at all, but only personal meaningful-
ness: If my belief is meaningful to me, if it makes me
feel secure, then everybody else must respect it. Here
we have the epitome of postmodern agnosticism, and
here we have the blatant confounding of meaning as
personal importance and meaning as cognitive content.
Subjective as Pertaining to a Human Subject
Yet a fourth ambiguity inheres in Reber and Slife’s
(this issue) usage. For them, if objectivity somehow
implies correctness and subjectivity implies incorrect-
ness, it remains that both regard human knowing, what
is “
known
in the mind” or “
known
about the thing in
itself ” (p. 6.2, emphasis added). But knowing occurs
only in a human mind; knowing is the act of a human
subject, the one who does the knowing. Therefore,
unavoidably, all knowing is subjective—because and in
the sense that it is the achievement of a human subject.
Thus, the proposed opposition between subjective and
objective confounds the knower (a subject) with the
quality of this knower’s generated knowledge (correct or
incorrect). This ambiguous usage, tainting all subjectiv-
ity, implies that within the realm of subjectivity, that
is, human consciousness, no accurate knowing can ever
occur, so pure relativism would reign unassailably. This
difference between
subjective
as human and
subjective
as wrong is crucial. Reber and Slife dismiss the differ-
ence between subjectivity and objectivity, but they must
rest their positive hermeneutical offering on an appeal
to subjectivity, for in hermeneutical theory subjectiv-
ity specifically regards the knowing subject and human
conscious experience. Contrariwise, in their ambiguous
usage, without warrant this same “
subjectivity
” implies
error and bias—as if no one could ever be right.
Therefore, on four counts, Reber and Slife’s
contrived dualism of subjectivity versus objectivity
collapses under a jumble of its own ambivalence and
incoherence. Besides, a still further and perverse ques-
tion remains: Argued presumably as valid or, at least, as
worthy of consideration, how does their own position
stand up as subjective or objective? Or is the matter
not worth considering? In any case, when the issues are
sorted out, no problem remains; science and theology
go hand in hand.
Subjectivity in Lonergan and in Hermeneutical
Theory
That notion that
subjective
means biased provides an
incisive segue into discussion of hermeneutic theory.
Reber and Slife (this issue) variably discuss bias in terms
