Lost Opportunities, Partial Successes, and Key Questions: Some Historical Lessons

To shed light on some key perennial issues, I discuss several historical efforts to discern optimal understandings of human persons that take seriously both Christian faith and academic psychology. These include Gordon Allport's disguised htegrative efforts; a 1924 book, An Elementary Christian Psychology; and Paul Meehl's 1958 integration book. I conclude that opportunities are lost: when seeking resoectability becomes a primary motivator for Christians interested in psychology, when psychology's implicit ethical and metaphysical assumptions are not recognized and critiqued, when efforts to create a Christian Psychology are based on a particular cultural-historical understanding of Christ faith that is assumed to be the only correct view of it, when Christians fail to engage with mainstream psychology, when Christians fail to address rigorously key problems in the psychology/Christian faith interface, when Christians use ambiguous or supposedly neutral language to pursue Christian goals, and when Christians fail to work through thoroughly and develop fully the implications of Christian faith for our understandings of the psychological dimensions of emboded human persons. Josd experiences a conversion to Christ, with behavioral, affective, and cognitive sequelae. In providing a psychological explanation of Jose, psychological scientists would draw on a particular store of knowledge about human beings, and employ characteristic methods (usually scientific) to understand him. Theologians--qua theologians--would likely draw on a very different knowledge base (understanding Jose in terms of God's relationship with him, God's will, God's commandments, morality, and grace) and employ alternative methods. Transdisciplinary efforts to make sense of, connect, or integrate the divergent approaches of academic psychologists and theologians in order to best understand the psychological dimensions of Jose and other people are profoundly complex. Is Jose's transformation psychological? Ethical? Spiritual? All of the above? A variety of disciplines claim to provide at least partial understanding of him. Each discipline oversimplifies. Although some reduction of complexity is inevitable (and may be helpful) in understanding complicated phenomena, oversimplification comes at a price--we fail to understand the psychological dimensions of persons as fully as possible. Articulating the relationships among Christianity and psychology (as an academic discipline tied to reason rather than faith) long preceded the founding of the Journal of Psychology and Theology (Vande Kemp, 1984). In this brief essay, I will consider some pre-1970 approaches (idiosyncratically selected), reviewing them for lessons they may teach us. (Warning: All authors select illustrations that advance their perspectives. I am no exception.) In 1923, the year my father was born, Gordon Allport wrote in a private letter that, "'I have never essentially wavered from my desire to correlate Psychology and Social Ethics'" (cited in Nicholson, 2003, p. 133). Allport was a lifelong Episcopalian whose Christian faith was closely tied to social ethics. Although in his public persona as Harvard psychologist, his psychology was secular, Allport's "entire approach to psychology," his biographer notes, "was ultimately grounded in a deeply felt religious commitment" (Nicholson, 2008, 21). Allport expressed his Christian commitment in some curious ways, however: He disguised the role his religious views played in his psychology and he pioneered approaches that stripped psychological phenomena of their moral (and spiritual) dimensions. When Allport entered psychology, character was a widely used term. However, he became "convinced" Nicholson (2003) observed, that psychologists interested in it "needed to distance themselves from talk of character if they were to prosper" (p. 151). The founder of personality psychology thus "devaluated" (Allport, 1927, p. …