Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Psychology and Christianity“

THE INTEGRATION OF PSYCHOLOGY & CHRISTIANITY: A Domain-Based Approach by William L. Hathaway and Mark A. Yarhouse. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2021. 199 pages. ISBN: 9780830841837. *Reading The Integration of Psychology and Christianity brought to mind the lively discussions about integration that I had with my fellow undergraduates at Gordon College some twenty years ago. We were hampered in reaching any agreement by the fact that our assigned text, Psychology and Christianity: Four Views,1 presented four authors who each defined integration in their own idiosyncratic way, which then resulted in us students talking past each other. *If only we'd had this book! Hathaway and Yarhouse resolve these confusions by offering a "domain-based approach." Rather than advocating for a particular integration approach, as has been common in integration scholarship, Hathaway and Yarhouse outline the multiplicity of ways in which the Christian psychologist might choose to integrate faith and psychology. This approach is one I found immediately useful, given my position as chair of psychology at a small Christian liberal arts college where I frequently mentor junior colleagues with less experience in Christian higher education as they learn to integrate faith into their teaching. Hathaway and Yarhouse's categories include the following: worldview integration, theoretical integration, applied integration, role integration, and personal integration. These categories not only offer a shared vocabulary for integration conversations, but they can serve as an inventory of one's comfort level in different types of integration (one may be quite comfortable doing personal integration while finding theoretical integration challenging, for example). Overall, the book is excellent as a catalyst for personal reflection and growth for the Christian psychologist, whether they be researcher, professor, or clinician. *A particular strength of the book is its emphasis on clinical and applied psychological work. The most original contributions are the chapters on applied integration and role integration. The former adapts a secular model for a Christian population or develops Christian interventions from Christian thought and practice while the later describes living out the role expectations of a particular vocation (e.g., counselor) in a way that is consistent with Christian identity. These chapters have many examples from Yarhouse and Hathaway's own experience in navigating these areas. Their clear articulation of the professional duties of the Christian who joins the counseling guild, for example, was extremely useful. I found myself grateful to have their take on role integration to offer to my aspiring therapist students, who often find themselves torn between personal conviction and professional obligations. Yarhouse and Hathaway offer a well-argued Christian perspective that emphasizes the priority of those professional obligations. *A few criticisms. I mentioned that this book reminded me of my integration discussions in the early 2000s. While the integration resources are helpfully updated and the whole book is very well resourced, I found that the core approach to integration had remained largely unchanged. That is to say, this is very much a book written by two fairly conservative white American evangelical men. While the authors are moderates in evangelical terms, Yarhouse's scholarship (in sexual and gender identity) brings him into American culture-wars territory. It is not surprising, then, that they would see the challenges of Christian psychologists to be primarily in dealing with an often-antagonistic secular psychology. To be clear, far from advocating a hostile approach to secular psychology in return, they model a subtle Christian attempt to influence psychology policies to be more compatible with Christian values--and indeed their personal examples of successfully doing this are laudably sensible. *However, the revelations of evangelical complicity during the Trump years and the current rise of American Christian nationalism have left me questioning whether the largely apolitical nature of my Christian training in psychology was sufficiently transformational. I find myself yearning for a post-Trump integration analysis, an approach that grapples with the harms of evangelicals' quest for power. Or to put it another way, I question the idea, as sometimes implied by the authors, that the primary challenge Christians working in psychology face is the problem of too little cultural power. *The book's most obvious limitations in this vein are in the worldview integration chapter. Here we find the conservative nonprofit Heterodox Academy and its idea of "viewpoint diversity" uncritically embraced. The suggestion is that the conservative/Christian worldview should be considered a type of diversity akin to racial or gender diversity, given its minority status in liberal-dominated psychology. Given the very real challenges presented by racism and sexism, this framing seems at best tone deaf and at worst an encouragement to evangelicals to approach psychology with a persecution mindset. Also missing from this picture is the fact that the discipline often aligns itself with powerful interests and is therefore much less concerned with political beliefs per se than with power (to give just one example, the 2015 Hoffman Report documented how, during the Bush era, the American Psychological Association colluded with the US Department of Defence to change the APA ethics code to allow psychologists to participate in "enhanced interrogations" of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay). Perhaps Christian integration efforts might involve an Imago Dei-informed attempt to challenge this status quo. My own graduate training in critical/feminist psychology prompted me to reflect on the harms that even well-meaning psychologists might perpetrate if they allow themselves to be used to enable the capitalist control of people. From Amazon warehouses to counseling practices, our neoliberal world offers many ways in which unwary Christian psychologists can contribute to the dehumanization of people. Counselors teach their clients to understand their mental struggles as caused by individual failings while ignoring the influence of systemic factors; this should be at least as much an ethical concern for Christian psychologists as the more typical hot-button trio of abortion, LGBTQ+, and euthanasia (Hathaway and Yarhouse tend to highlight these three in their examples). *Tellingly, in this book, the topic of social justice is relegated to the personal integration chapter as something that psychologists might choose to embrace as part of their individualistic spiritual development. Missing is the idea that justice or advocacy for the powerless might inform psychological theory from the get-go or even form a core part of the Christian worldview. In fact, the term "worldview" itself can be read as a sign of the static, inward-looking nature of the framing chosen here. Much as James Sire's books on the topic are classics, the fact remains that the term worldview is a distinctively evangelical Christian idea, out of touch with secular psychology. Further, the take on postmodernism that the worldview approach encourages verges on caricature. Although the authors of this book acknowledge some of these weaknesses, their choices in this chapter betray a lack of conversation with postmodern theorists in psychology, whose focus is not generally moral relativism but a critique of dominant power structures. Citing such scholars, many of whom make relevant critiques of psychology's philosophical blind spots, would have strengthened the worldview chapter. *One particularly clarifying move this book makes is to put integration typologies on a continuum with three major categories: assimilation, productive tension, and expanded horizons. The ideal integration work, they argue (riffing on Gadamer), results in an expanded horizon, where the insights of both sides are modified by fusion with the other. This idea is one that they might have taken further. Hathaway and Yarhouse are careful to articulate the privileged nature of scripture in such an encounter of horizons, but this seems to underestimate the cultural knowledge and assumptions that we import into scriptural interpretation. Surely the encounter of horizons is not pure divine revelation meeting pure psychological knowledge, but rather, the encounter is mediated by biased and finite human beings. The authors define worldview integration as "an attempt to reposition psychology within a cognitive frame that is coherently embedded within Christian thought and premised on Christian assumptions." I wish they had been more reflective about whose Christian thought and Christian assumptions they were presenting as normative. Given that this book is published by IVP Academic, this will likely not be a problem for their target audience, who probably share their assumptions. But I would expect a book that champions the expanded horizon as the telos of integration to be more influenced by a diversity of Christian voices and a diversity of psychological approaches. *Perhaps this is more a complaint about psychology integration work as a whole, rather than this book in particular. Overall, I am very appreciative of this contribution, and simply hope that the foundation laid here can be used by readers to build integration efforts that are more self-reflective and outward-looking integration efforts than the book itself models. Hathaway and Yarhouse's main contributions in this book are (1) a comprehensive and sophisticated review of past integration work, (2) the helpful clarifying domain categories, and (3) innovations in the areas of applied integration and role integration, areas that previous integration work has neglected. For those hoping to get up to speed on integration work in psychology or hoping to grow in the sophistication of their integration efforts, this is a valuable resource and very much worth reading. *Note *1Eric L. Johnson and Stanton L. Jones, eds., Psychology and Christianity: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000). *Reviewed by Elissa Rodkey, Associate Professor of Psychology, Crandall University, Moncton, NB E1C 9L7.

This article is written from the perspective of both professor and student, detailing the development of a system of psychology as a part of senior seminar. After briefly introducing professor and student, we each tell about the purpose of the project, the preparation for writing the system, the process of developing it, and the product—a system of psychology.

AbstractThis paper describes and compares two imageries for “peace” found in contemporary North America. Both arise within a context of “expressive individualism” as depicted by Bellah et al. and both attempt to ground values beyond subjective preferences. Popular psychology, especially represented by Maslow and self-help writings, relies primarily on the image of organic growth for a vision of peace and fulfillment. Language of unresolvable conflict and warfare is entirely avoided. In contrast, Charismatic Christianity, although it too employs the language of “health” and “growth” also advocates an imagery of peace focused on the triumphant Christ enthroned in heaven, after his defeat of spiritual enemies. The author suggests that the vigorous use of this language is best understood as a corrective and supplement to the “growth” themes more fully congruent with expressive individualism.

Building upon the work of Jones, Ripley, Kurusu, and Worthington, Jr. (1998), we identified the most influential books and articles within the integration literature in 1985–1994, 1995–2004, and 2005–2010. We tallied references within the Journal of Psychology and Christianity and the Journal of Psychology and Theology and identified trends. There were differential citation rates across the three time periods for both articles and books. Consistently, the most frequently cited works were cited less often in the first time period compared to the following time periods. The number of edited volumes and sensitivity to knowing and doing integration well have both increased. Psychodynamic theory provided fertile soil for the growth of integration. The growing interest in forgiveness has been reflected within the integration literature. Mainstream psychology has increasingly applied spiritualities to practice. Finally, the emotional atmosphere on the boundaries of psychology and Christianity seems to have undergone some change.

Those interested in the intersection of science and Christianity, rightfully pay attention to specific issues in the landscape of science and religion. Despite progress made in science-religion scholarship, asking and answering thorny questions and unearthing new ones, it sometimes appears that these advances make little progress shifting the narrative in individuals or culture. In this article, I argue that for progress in difficult conversations, such as those between science and Christianity, we must acknowledge and account for the psychology of the individuals engaging in these conversations. This article discusses how normal psychological processes involved in reasoning may influence engagement with science-religion material. I conclude by offering several suggestions to increase the fruitfulness of these conversations.

The celebration of the 500th anniversary of Christianity in the Philippines is also an opportunity for the University of Santo Tomas (Manila) to look into her own history, and on how that history intersects with the larger history of Christianity in the Philippines. Being one of the oldest Christian institutions in the Philippines, the University has been home to several thinkers who have, in their own way, contributed to the growth of Christianity in the country. This paper takes a historical look at the contribution of one Thomasian, Fr. Angel de Blas, OP, who wrote and taught in the University of Santo Tomas from the early to the middle part of the 20th Century. He thrived at a time when new developments were emerging in the academic landscape of the Philippines, particularly in the area of philosophy and psychology. At that time, psychology was slowly emerging as a distinct discipline in the human sciences, and the philosophical temperament in the country was also slowly embracing traditions other than scholasticism and Thomism. The paper will attempt to articulate Fr. Angel de Blas, OP’s contribution during this time of the transition. It also hopes to show that this Dominican has demonstrated a way of dialoguing Catholic philosophy and life with the developments of the sciences.

This article considers what integration efforts in psychology would look like if informed by a trinitarian account of creation. Further theological reflection about the doctrine of creation reveals four key conclusions that are valuable for conceiving the relationship between theology and psychology: (1) The goodness of the created realm establishes the investigation and exploration of human nature through science and psychology; (2) Human nature can be explored through psychology because God’s providential care allows a certain “order” of creation to be preserved despite the reality of sin; (3) God endows humanity with creative abilities to discover and develop the created realm and culture through the science of psychology; (4) God’s trinitarian relations with the world establishes the theological basis for the social, embodied, and relational aspects of human nature that are able to be discerned through the study of psychology. The implications that these four key conclusions have for psychological research and clinical psychology will also be discussed.

150 Northern Irish University undergraduate students completed the Francis Scale of Attitude towards Christianity, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, and a single-item measure of frequency of church attendance. No significant association was found between scores on the Francis Scale of Attitude towards Christianity and scores on the Satisfaction with Life Scale ( r = .05) or between frequency of church attendance and scores on the Satisfaction with Life Scale ( r = .00). These data provide no evidence that, among a sample of Northern Irish University undergraduate students, those with a more positive attitude towards Christianity or a greater frequency of church attendance are more satisfied with life.

Jung's thinking and experience, while not making a perfect “fit” with Christianity, do provide the best framework upon which to base the integration of psychology and theology. Jung has much to offer Christians seeking such integration Cited are his extensive education in the history of modern thought, his understanding of the problems involved in materialistic rationalism and of idealism, the acknowledgement he paid to the spiritual world, and other factors. The author describes how Jung's works aided his own understanding of the Bible, God, and sin.

Don Browning has been a major figure in pastoral theology for a number of years. His most recent major work (Browning, 1987b) is a challenging analysis of and dialogue with the religious dimensions of many of the major modern psychological paradigms that dominate the mental health field. Browning writes from a self-described “liberal Christianity or mainline church” perspective rather than that of evangelical Christianity. The reader will find this perspective clearly articulated, among other places, in the introductory sections below, where he defines his use of the words “church” and “Christian faith.” Though he writes from a nonevangelical perspective, Browning offers a number of insights for JPT readers into the assets and liabilities that a relationship with the field of psychology offers the Church. His analysis reflects a depth understanding of the contemporary view of social science as a cultural phenomenon, one that is founded upon assumptions that are often religious and moral in nature and yet are often poorly articulated. He discusses the often unrecognized ways in which the Church contributes to psychology by being a “carrier” of the moral and religious views of persons that undergird the psychologies. In the main section of this article, he develops a cautiously appreciative view of how the psychologies can help the Church in enhancing its understanding of the varieties of human pathologies, in challenging its understanding of human development, in enhancing the Church's effectiveness in promoting healing and growth, and in refining the Church's understanding of ethics. In each of these areas, however, he also expresses concerns about the potential and actual negative impact that the psychologies can and have had upon the church.

This article reviews Mary Daly's five books published between 1968 and 1987. Mary Daly is a key contributor to the feminist view of religion. The focus of this discussion is her intellectual trajectory that includes critique and reconstruction of both psychology and religion. As she moves from reform to radical feminism and from Christianity to postchristian feminist spirituality, Daly increasingly views both psychology and religion as aspects of oppressively patriarchal culture. Simultaneously, her own work includes psychological insights and envisions psychic integrity as a goal of the spiritual revolution of feminism. Daly's work sponsors a psychology of religion and dialogue between psychology and religion that opposes sexism.

A sample of 149 university students completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales together with the Francis Scale of Attitude Toward Christianity. The data indicated that university students classified as Feeling Types hold a more positive attitude toward Christianity than those classified as Thinking Types. These findings replicate the 1999 report of Jones and Francis.

The relationship between Christianity and racial prejudice was evaluated by means of a questionnaire which included the Shepherd Scale, the Christian Conservatism Scale, and the Multifactor Racial Attitude Inventory. The instrument was administered to two groups of college psychology students, one predominantly Christian and the other predominatly non-Christian (low scorers on the Christian scales). Although the Christian group scored significantly higher on the Shepherd and Christian Conservatism Scales, no significant differences were found between the two groups with respect to racial prejudice. Furthermore, the dimension of Christianity and the dimension of racial prejudice were independent of one another with respect to correlational measures and a principal components factor analysis.

Abstract In this review article, Graeme Smith, A Short History of Secularism, is reviewed with its main arguments regarding secularisation debate. A radical reconsideration of secularism and its social history, starting with the Greeks and continuing to modernity and the contemporary period, are offered by this book. The book’s attempt to construct a historical narrative of Christianity is an essential contribution to literature. It highlights the changes Christianity is exposed to as it moved across Europe and different mindsets that influenced people during this period. Students who are interested in studies in pastoral psychology, religion, and secularism are the primary audience for this monograph. However, anyone interested in the secularism debate will find it interesting.

The lordship of Christ over all of a Christian's life is an assumption basic to Christianity. The acknowledgement of his lordship in psychology is especially problematic today because of the pervasive naturalism and neo-positivism of modern psychology. Nevertheless, an understanding of the kingdom concept in Scripture suggests that Christians are inevitably called to work towards the expression of Christ's lordship in psychology. This occurs as the Christian pursues psychological knowledge and practice before God, aware that all true truth about human nature is an expression of God's mind, that sin and finitude limit one's ability to grasp the truth, that the Scriptures are needed to properly interpret human nature, and that kingdom activity involves a faithful response to Christ's lordship in one's work with others and one's knowing of human nature.

Recently two studies have reported on the test-retest reliability of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity; however, these studies were limited to samples of university students. This study examined the temporal stability of both the 24- and 7-item versions of the junior version of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity (Francis, 1978; Francis, Greer, & Gibson, 1991) over a six-week period among a sample of 58 English children aged between 9 and 11 years old. Data demonstrated that stability across the two administrations was very high for both the 24- (r=.74) and 7-item (r=.67) versions, and there was no significant change between Time 1 and Time 2 for either version. These data support the short-term test-retest reliability of both the 24- and 7-item versions of the junior version of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity among children.

Today's educational environment is being transformed by online technologies that open new venues for teaching and make education accessible far beyond the traditional classroom environment. How might these changes affect the ways we teach the integration of psychology and Christianity? Three faculty members dialogue about such integration opportunities, advantages, and potential disadvantages.

This study evaluated the test-retest reliability of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity short-form. 39 Northern Irish undergraduate students completed the measure on two occasions separated by one week. Stability across the two administrations was high, r = .92, and there was no significant change between Time 1 ( M = 25.2, SD = 5.4) and Time 2 ( M = 25.7, SD = 6.2). These data support the short-term test-retest reliability of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity short-form.

Teaching integration involves engaging students as active participants in the unfolding relationship of psychology and Christianity, with a particular focus on integration. Ten specific teaching strategies are offered to help students enter into the challenges and opportunities of integration. The teaching strategies are organized according to Moon's (1997) four directions for integration: practical, personal, classic, and contemporary.

To facilitate cross-cultural research in the psychology of religion, a sample of 453 young people from Grades 8, 9,10,11 and 12 attending a secondary school within the provincial education department in South Africa completed the Francis scale of Attitude Towards Christianity. The data provide preliminary evidence that supports the reliability and validity of this instrument, and commend it for further examination across a wider and more representative sample of learners within other ethnic and language groups in South Africa.

A sample of 496 older men and women in England, mainly in their sixties and seventies, completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory together with the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity. The data demonstrated that psychological femininity is key to individual differences in religiosity (as assessed by attitude toward Christianity) within the sexes and that, after taking gender role orientation into account, biological sex conveyed no additional predictive power in respect of individual differences in religiosity (as assessed by attitude toward Christianity). This finding is explained in terms of Eysenck's biologically-based dimensional model of personality which construes psychological masculinity and femininity as one of the seven constituent components of one of the three major dimensions of personality (psychoticism). This psychologically-based theory renders redundant sociologically-based socialization theories designed to account for differences in religiosity between the sexes.

Existential-humanistic psychology has started the tradition of the creative transformation of classical-existentialist ideas in the practice of their involvement and application in psychology and psychotherapy. The source of these qualitative changes in the psychology of the twentieth and early XXI centuries was, in particular, the multifaceted creativity and ideas of S. Kierkegaard. His religious anthropology was rooted not only in Christology, but also in psychology. But psychology does not become a means of indulgence for a little foolish person, but a way to show her what she had not known about herself before. Contrary to the natural sciences of the time, his method did not set human boundaries, because it proceeded from the fact that the horizons of her hopes are, in principle, endless and the purpose of each person is to become equal with him. "WITH. Kierkegorov's main idea is, "writes M. Biergoso," that a person should be understood as a relationship: a constant attitude towards himself, his environment, and God. This is the most successful definition of the inseparable triad of the basic existential problem ..., which defines Kierkegaard's thinking as a whole "

The recent welcome inclusion of the study of African psychology within the psychology degree curriculum of some forward-thinking African universities has been lauded as a great positive drive in the right direction. In the past, the practices that prevailed were those of mainstream Western psychology imported to Africa. This awkward situation originated during the period of colonialism and the emergence of missionary Christianity in Africa. This article proposes that if the current positive attitude toward African psychology is to last and bear fruit, there is a need to formally inaugurate a new order or tradition (referred to in this paper as the Madiban tradition) that would anchor and open up the study of psychology in African universities towards a new future: a future in which the progressive arm of both Western and African approaches to psychology would coexist and enjoy enduring mutual respect and equitable participatory presence in these programmes. This paper highlights the theoretical framework undergirding this vision and the challenges to be faced and new shifts to be made in implementing such a vision.

Abstract Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: (1) a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, (2) that people with predominantly incompatibilist commitments are likely to exhibit stronger dualist beliefs than people with predominantly compatibilist commitments, and (3) people who self-identify as Christians are more likely to be dualists and incompatibilists than people who do not self-identify as Christians. We present the results of two studies (n = 378) that challenge two of these expectations. While we do find a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, we found no significant difference in dualist tendencies between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Moreover, we found that self-identifying as Christian did not significantly predict preference for a particular metaphysical conception of free will. This calls into question assumptions about the relationship between beliefs about free will, dualism, and Christianity.

The proposition that, to paraphrase Carl Degler, Christianity came to British North America in the first ships, has long enjoyed popular and scholarly currency. The popular account, sometimes found today in evangelical Christian circles, holds that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colonists erected a mighty kingdom of God whose gates the humanist barbarians have unfortunately breached. The scholarly variation derives from Perry Miller's eloquent melodrama about Puritanism's rise and fall. Miller anatomized Puritanism as a carapace of Ramist logic, covenant theology, and faculty psychology surrounding the visceral vitality of Augustinian piety, an intellectual body that grew in health and cogency in Tudor-Stuart England and then suppurated on the American strand, corrupted by internal contradictions, creeping secularism, and periwigs. Miller understood that he was describing one single Christian tradition—Reformed Protestantism of a particularly perfervid variety—but such was his narrative's majesty that his tale of New England Puritanism ramified into the story of Christianity in the colonies; in the beginning, all the world was New England, and, at the end, the extent to which the colonists had created a common Christian identity owed mightily to Puritan conceptions of the national covenant. Miller was too good a scholar to miss the pettiness of Puritan religious politics and the myriad ways in which even the founding generation of Saints failed to live up to their own best values, but his chronicle of Puritan decline parallels the popular vision that the colonial period represented the “Golden Age” of Christianity in America: the faith began on a fortissimo chord but has decrescendoed ever since. The logic of this declension scheme spotlights some historical issues while ignoring others. The central problem for declension theory is to explain how and why Christianity's vigor ebbed, whereas the creation of a Christian culture in the colonies—the erection of churches, the elaboration of governing apparatuses, the routinization of personal devotion and moral order—is made unproblematic: it just spilled out of the Mayflower and the Arbella onto Plymouth Rock and Shawmut.

A sample of 16 male and 30 female undergraduates completed the Greer and Francis Scale of Rejection of Christianity. The data support the internal consistency reliability and construct validity of the scale for this sample.

The psychology of art has had an enormous development since the middle of the last century; however, no much work has been done in association with religious and sacred art. This paper aims to provide a brief history of the use of images in the three great monotheistic religions, i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.All three religions have been influenced by the commandment (Exodus, 20:4), which prohibits idolatry. Nevertheless, when it comes to the use of images with religious content, the commandment is interpreted differently by the three. If in Judaism and Islam the use of images is not particularly widespread and is bound to precise conditions, in Christianity a strong relationship with the visual arts has developed, at least until the Reformation. After this split, the use of images was only encouraged by the Catholic Church even though, with the Enlightenment, religious and sacred art suffered a decline even in Catholic culture.It was not until the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that the Catholic Church returned to support and encourage art in the religious context. It will then be necessary to distinguish between religious art and sacred art because they serve different functions. Precisely because it is a field in which deepening is possible, it could be very interesting for the psychology of art to study the perception of religious and sacred images, for example investigating constructs associated with the perception of vitality and aesthetic judgment.