Gary:
You are listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. Still to come, Dave and Tom continue their weekly in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation. Please stay with us.
CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH
Now, Contending for the Faith. Tom, Martin and Deidre respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call. Our question this week: “My gut feeling tells me there is something very wrong with psychotherapy. On the other hand, when I hear about all the complex and even serious psychological problems some people have, it seems to make sense that only a trained professional can truly supply the necessary help.”
T. A. McMahon:
Martin, Deidre, this seems to be one of the big myths that’s been promoted, propagated, however you want to say it.
Martin:
Yes. It’s the myth of, you need a professional, and it’s usual answer to—somebody says, I have a problem—they say you need a professional. However, here again, we have the usual dichotomy between research results and what the practitioners do. And in various research settings in which they use amateurs versus professionals the results are kind of mixed. In certain cases the professionals do better and in other cases the amateurs do better and certain cases it’s a tie but there hasn’t been any demonstration at any time that anybody needs to be a professional in order to get results in dealing with human problems. This has been looked at in a variety of ways whether it’s amateurs versus professionals or they sometimes use graduate students who aren’t in psychology, just a lot of different ways. But the challenge that I have given is, if you take two groups of “therapists”, I say in quotes, because one group can be true therapists and the other group can be anybody’s. Just take some people who normally deal with people and call them therapists, too. Send them both patients and then wait for the results to happen and I can just tell you the results are basically going to be equivalent. Again, it’s the fact that the real reason people change is because they want to and, what you need to do when they can’t do it themselves is to bring somebody alongside in order to help them do it. And so, the idea that professionals are needed is not true.
T. A. McMahon:
Now, what I think people forget sometimes about psychotherapy is that the heart of it is whether it be a psychiatrist in most cases or a psychologist or, as you said, just an aunt or an uncle with some wisdom. The heart here is talk, it’s rhetoric, right?
Deidre:
That’s right, it’s just talk and one person who has really spoken out against psychotherapy and it’s underlying psychologies and said psychotherapy is a myth said—this is Thomas Szasz—he said, It’s just talk, if someone wants to pay to talk to me that’s fine but it’s just talk. And basically, what a therapist is, is a paid friend, stays around as long as there is money and actually what they have, they have their credentials, they have their licenses on the wall, they have their degrees, they have an office, they have all of this professional status in order to engender hope. For the believer, where does our hope lie? You see, all of this is a false hope but our hope in Christ is a true hope. It is a hope that gives us promises that will be fulfilled for eternity. And so, even the whole professional stance, you need a professional—displaces the person’s real source of hope.
T. A. McMahon:
Martin, did you want to add anything to that?Martin:
Well, I was going to say, related to this whole amateur, professional, this is one of the really big problems in the evangelical church. This whole professionalization of this relationship with, somebody needs help and you’ve got to have a so-called expert to do it. We are the experts, they are not the experts, we have the truth, they don’t have the truth, we have the power that we’ve been empowered with through the Word and through the Holy Spirit. We don’t need their theories, ideas, guesses, opinions, we have the facts. they just have whatever rhetoric they have come up with.
Deidre:
And the “we” he’s talking about includes all Christians who have been walking with the Lord, learning the Word and seeing how the Lord works in their lives.
T. A. McMahon:
You know that’s our great encouragement for, not only this program but for I am excited to have you guys on board here with us. We just want people to get back to God’s Word, to walk in the truth of God’s Word, to be a servant. As you mentioned before, Galatians 6: 1 or 2, we are to bear one another’s burdens. I mean, we have that mandate, that exhortation from God’s Word and it wouldn’t be there is we were not able to fulfill it. So, we want to encourage people, Search the Scriptures Daily, get into God’s Word and you can be fruitful and productive in all matters of living, of trying to be fruitful and productive to the glory of God.
