Christian Psychology
54
of providential naturalism offers the best hope for the
reconciliation of religion and science, but even Catholi-
cism retains strands of occasionalist thinking.
Being privileged and humbled in understanding
Lonergan’s
Method in Theology,
I am convinced that the
pervasive inability to let go of virtually magic notions
of divine providence is a left-over from a pre-scientific
era. To insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old or
to oppose sexual diversity and the law of gravity for
“revealed” reasons is outrageously unacceptable in the
twenty-first century. Yet the mass delusion of naively
pious religion sustains these notions—all in a sup-
posed effort to protect the ultimacy of God and, more
likely, to protect the emotional security of the believers.
In contrast, theologically refined notions of God and
creation require no defensiveness of theist faith. Those
outdated ideas derived only from attempts to express
faith in God via the “science” of their day, so the science
is incidental to the faith, and the science can be updated
without denying the faith. But this sorting-out of the is-
sues requires the very strategies of contemporary think-
ing and science that the religionists are, in principle,
often unwilling to embrace. A deadlock results.
The one glaringly valid, but misconstrued, concern
of theistic psychology is the lack of spiritual sensitiv-
ity in contemporary culture and its social sciences
(Helminiak, 2013). Thus, with only some exaggera-
tion, Richards and Bergin (2005) wrote, “It [scientific
naturalism] denies or trivializes much of what is most
important and distinctive about human beings, includ-
ing mind, consciousness, agency, morality, responsibil-
ity, love, relationships, creativity, intuition, meaning,
purpose, and faith in God” (p. 45). However, apart
perhaps from the final item (see Pargament, 1997),
these indispensable matters are not theological; they are
human and spiritual. A crucial confounding issue in this
discussion is the inability of many theists to distinguish
between the spiritual and the divine (Helminiak, 1982,
1987b, 1996a, 2006, 2008a), so—despite the example
of Buddhism—they must insist on belief in God to
have genuine spirituality. Slife and Richards (2001) are
brazen in this insistence (Helminiak, 2001). This inabil-
ity is part and parcel of that same reluctance to embrace
the complex and differentiated thinking that, on many
fronts, the scientific revolution and now globalization
have thrust upon us. Simply said, outdated simplistic
religion is struggling to survive in a highly sophisticated
culture. Both are the worse for it. Spirituality used to
be the domain of religion, but in the West always in
terms of theism. So now, when secular society naturally
has no spiritual sensitivity and having it supposedly still
requires believing in (one among the many available
and blatantly conflicting notions of ) God, spiritual
concerns
per se
have no home, and that list of indispens-
able spiritual matters goes ignored. In the extreme, the
current pluralistic religious situation requires that only
unthinking people can be spiritual if spiritual means
theist, and thinking spiritual people must reject belief
in God (certainly in many religious forms) as sectarian
fantasy.
Following Lonergan (1957/1992, 1972), I have
been proposing a sophisticated methodological solution
to this dilemma (e.g., Helminiak, 1996a, 1998, 2008c).
However, the solution is not a matter of somehow in-
serting “God” into psychology and science. The notion
of “theistic psychology” is an oxymoron, and the proj-
ect, a well-intentioned but misguided enterprise. The
solution is, rather, a matter of a consciousness-based
psychology of spirituality supplemented, as desired,
with good theology. It remains to be seen how long
popular religion can go on ignoring the current culture
shift and how long theorists, too, will go on basing their
theories on popular religion.
Daniel Helminiak
is Professor in the humanistic and
transpersonal Department of Psychology at the Univer-
sity of West Georgia, Carrollton Georgia, near Atlanta,
where he lives. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in
Rome, he ministered in a large suburban parish in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his home town, for four years
before moving into an educational ministry. He holds
a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Andover Newton
Theological School and Boston College, where he was
teaching assistant to Professor Bernard Lonergan. He
taught at the graduate Oblate School of Theology in
San Antonio, Texas, and then earned a second Ph.D.,
in Human Development, at the University of Texas at
Austin. His area of specialization is the interdisciplinary
study of spirituality as exemplified in his many publi-
cations, the most recent of which are
The Transcended
Christian: What Do You Do When You Outgrow Your
Religion?
and
Spirituality for Our Global Community
.
His
God in the Brain: A Lonerganian Integration of Neu-
roscience, Psychology, Spiritualogy, and Theology
is in press
at State University of New York (SUNY) Press. He regu-
larly teaches courses in Human Sexuality, Foundations
of Neuroscience, and Statistics for the Social Sciences
and is most widely know for his international best-seller
What the Bible
Really
Says about Homosexuality.
He is on
the Web at
. Correspondence
concerning this article should be addressed to Daniel A.
Helminiak, Ph.D., Ph.D., LPC, Professor of Psychol-
ogy, University of West Georgia, 1601 Maple Street,
Carrollton, GA 30118. Email:
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Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1,
69-80.
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