Eric L. Johnson

CHRIST, THE LORD OF PSYCHOLOGY

The lordship of Christ over all of a Christians 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 Christs 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 Gods mind, that sin and finitude limit ones ability to grasp the truth, that the Scriptures are needed to properly interpret human nature, and that kingdom activity involves a faithful response to Christs lordship in ones work with others and ones knowing of human nature.

A Place for the Bible within Psychological Science

Many Christian psychologists have been motivated to relate psychology and the teachings of the Bible. However, this task has met with limited success for a variety of reasons, some of which include the secular zeitgeist within which we operate, a lack of unanimity in the Christian psychological community regarding the place of the Bible in psychology and how to go about relating the two, and an inadequate understanding of the nature of psychological science as well as the Bible and theology. After dealing with some of these issues, eight roles that the Bible might serve within psychology are presented.

The Call of Wisdom: Adult Development within Christian Community, Part II: Towards a Covenantal Constructivist Model of Post-Formal Development

Certain teachings in the Bible point to the need for post-formal thought structures. However, Christian post-formal development has features that distinguish it from modern post-formal development, primarily because of the divine and social dimensions of thought-formation in the Christian framework. From the Christian standpoint, true human understanding is composed by humans but derived from God; it is reconstructive. True human understanding is also rooted in the context of the Christians communal, and personal, covenantal relation with God. Hence, the materials relevant to a Christian theory of early adult development point to a model termed “covenantal constructivism.”

The Call of Wisdom: Adult Development within Christian Community, Part I: The Crisis of Modern Theories of Post-Formal Development

Becoming an adult is a distinct, but gradual transition in the development of an individual. A number of theories exist that attempt to describe some important features that distinguish early adult cognition from adolescent, including differences in moral reasoning (Kohlberg), meaning-making (Perry), and faith development (Fowler), among others. After reviewing these three influential theories, some of their similarities are noted, including their common ancestry in modernity. A case is then made that present theories of qualitative adult cognitive development are only of limited value to the Christian community because they are as much an expression of modern thought as they are a documentation of how young adults in the United States accommodate to the modern thought to which they are exposed.

Whatever Happened to the Human Soul? A Brief Christian Genealogy of a Psychological Term

The term soul disappeared from psychological discourse as modern psychology arose in the late 1800s. Yet the concept is used almost universally across cultures, and the term had served a valuable lexical purpose for previous centuries in the West as a general label for human inner life that included moral and religious connotations. The removal of soul from Western psychological discourse provides an instructive example of the power of modern, naturalistic sensibilities to control what counts as valid—power that is masked as an “objective” search for knowledge. Some reasons for resurrecting the term soul are provided.

Protecting One's Soul: A Christian Inquiry into Defensive Activity

Defense mechanisms are widely accepted as important psychological constructs. However, each theoretical community is obliged to reinterpret such complex constructs in light of its own ultimate framework and set of goods. For the Christian, this entails an examination of biblical and theological materials that bear upon the defenses. Søren Kierkegaards work illustrates the possible fruits of original sin and Christian exploration of defensive activity. As is well-known, Freud and his followers developed an orientation to the defenses that is rich, but is also one rooted in secular, naturalistic assumptions. The article concludes with a discussion of some developmental, moral, and treatment implications regarding the defenses from a Christian standpoint.

Growing in Wisdom in Christian Community: Toward Measures of Christian Postformal Development

On the basis of theoretical work reported elsewhere, scales were developed with the goal of measuring some phenomena associated with Christian postformal thought development. These scales were used in 3 studies. The first examined scale intercorrelations; the second compared scores on the scales between evangelical and nonevangelical college samples; the third was a 4-year longitudinal study of a group of evangelical college students. Significant differences in scale scores were found in the evangelical and nonevangelical college samples and across the 4 years of the longitudinal study, which showed that individualism and relativism are not necessary concommitants of maturing cognitive development within the Christian community, calling into question the reliance on exclusively secular theories for understanding early adult development of Christians.

Self-Esteem in the Presence of God

Many individuals living in our post-Christian culture have placed the self in the position most cultures reserve for their god(s). Present cultural interest in self-esteem flows from this religious orientation. Unfortunately, the Christian church has not been entirely impervious to this non-Christian religious influence. While acknowledging the psychological importance of self-esteem, the author suggests that self-esteem is an unavoidably religious experience. An attempt is made to outline a Christian understanding of proper self-esteem: an affective response to the self-knowledge and self-evaluation that results from knowing God. The evaluative context of the Christian and non-Christian are also contrasted. The article concludes with some implications of the material for personal life and professional practice.

Sin, Weakness, and Psychopathology

This article is concerned with distinguishing the peculiar characteristics of the biblical themes of sin and weakness. In the Bible, and in Christian theology, sin is considered to be a power not created by God but by the sinner. Consequently, sin is something for which the sinner is held responsible. Contrariwise, weakness is a given limitation upon a normal or natural human ability or condition and therefore preeminently not something for which we are held responsible. Moral fault is that unique condition which is a combination of both sin and weakness and which partakes of both sets of characteristics simultaneously. The author concludes with a number of implications which these concepts have for a Christian view of psychopathology.

Reading by design: evolutionary psychology and the neuropsychology of reading.

A large body of evidence exists which points to the existence of a neural substrate dedicated to reading: (a) neuroimaging (and other) studies which have identified neural regions activated in reading by normal Ss; (b) similar studies on individuals with reading disabilities that show inactivity in those regions; (c) cases of hyperlexia in which preschool children have well-developed word recognition abilities, far beyond their reading comprehension; (d) persons born blind who activate the same neural regions during braille reading as sighted readers do with visual text; (e) similarities between the neuropsychology of language and of reading; and (f) other, similar neural regions which process information that has greater adaptive significance (e.g., an object recognition substrate). Naturalistic evolution would predict there would be no neural tissue dedicated to reading. So this body of research raises questions about the ability of evolution to account for this psychological phenomenon, creates a significant problem for evolutionary psychologys theoretical commitment to modularity, and provides an example of psychological evidence that points to intelligent design.