Scriptural Guidelines for Testing Christian Views on Psychology

Scriptural Guidelines for Testing Christian Views on Psychology

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to expand the boundaries of our knowledge by exploring some relevant facts and figures related to scriptural guidelines for testing Christian views on psychology. One of the greatest accomplishments of ancient science was the discovery of the human psyche. Psychology, the study of the psyche (soul), was largely brought about by Greek philosophers, in particular the Platonists, Peripatetic, Stoics, Epicureans, Gnostics, and Christians. The Greeks were able to at once apply analysis, imagination, speculation, logic, and intuition to a thorny, mysterious, hidden object of inquiry—the mind. During the span of a millennium from the appearance of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey to Augustine's conversion experience, ancient thinkers were able to discover the existence of the individual, the singular mind tied to unique experiences; the emergence of the self from a sea of others, the collective mass of humanity; the identification of the self with the Other, the numinous, the sum and total of all existence; and how the individual's momentary awareness fits in the overall fluidity of time.

Christianity as it developed during the first few centuries CE brought together into one system of thought the psychology of antiquity as it was developed over the course of several millennia by the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Greeks. The Gospels and Epistles of the Greek New Testament present an approach to the human psyche that is at the same time spiritual and materialist, based on surrender as well as freedom, in direct contrast to the omniscience of God, yet sharing in the mind of God.

The crucial development in ancient Christian psychology revolves around the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth combined with the belief by the early Christian church that he was the Christ, the Logos. The fourth gospel, the Gospel of John, is the crucial text in the emergence of Christianity from the psychology of the ancient Near East and ancient Greeks. John interpreted Jesus as the Greek logos, the creative force of the universe, the source of reason, knowledge, and being. The Jesus of the Gospel of John is, as well, the begotten, co-eternal word of the Hebrew conception of God, Yahweh. What was completely new and unique amid the religious and philosophical history of the ancient Mediterranean was that Jesus, besides being the logos, the nous, and the ousia, was also a simple peasant born to a carpenter and his wife in the poor rural society of first-century BCE Palestine.

That Jesus was a man, or as he called himself, the Son of Man, had a profound effect on the development of Christian psychology. It is altogether a different experience to find within oneself a sense of knowing, being, feeling, and thinking that is human rather than eternal, infinite, transcendent, and anonymous. One knows, knowing that Jesus knew. One feels, knowing that Jesus felt. One thinks, knowing that Jesus thought. In the next section, the author will Complete a study ...