Is Psychotherapy Anti-Christian?

Tom: You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him.

In this first segment of our program, Dave and I are discussing the topic of Psychology and the Church, a subject we have written about rather extensively. And we’ve also produced an hour-long DVD titled, Psychology and the Church: Critical Questions, Crucial Answers. 

Furthermore, we’re in the process of putting together a book that will be a collection of the many articles we’ve written dealing with psychology. The Lord willing, it will be off the press late this spring.

Dave, I’d like to pick up where we left off last week, and for those who didn’t have a chance to see or hear our program, we’re talking in general about psychology, and we identified that as psychological counseling or psychotherapy. Basically, the mode of psychotherapy is conversation. People talk, people listen, and they deal with issues of life.

So, Dave, as we stated last week, the evangelical church—I’m talking about the conservative, Bible-believing church—is so heavily into psychological counseling that it’s really astonishing. And the reason it’s astonishing, as we pointed out last week, is that the concepts of psychotherapy—that man is innately good, that self is the solution to man’s problems—these are antithetical to what the Bible teaches.

Dave: Absolutely.

Tom: So why, then, do you think evangelicals have gotten into psychology?

Dave: Well, Tom, I’m sure there are a number of possible answers to that question, and this is my opinion, of course. I think that the confidence in the Bible has been undermined—not just by psychology; that was sort of the icing on the cake. This has been going on for a long time through Darwin, evolution, through the influence of that…

Tom: Which is false science, by the way, and that’s an analogy that it has with psychotherapy.

Dave: Right. Well, Tom, if you went back to the early days of science, I mean when modern science was first developed, say, let’s take Boyle’s law of gases. Well, the man was an evangelical Christian. He even left in his will an endowment—it’s at Oxford University today: lectures to refute atheism and the skeptics, and so forth. He was opposed to Darwin.

So, we’re almost—I could name them, but I’m not going to name them, down from Newton and on down the line, they all believed in God, okay? That’s the way science began.

Now, it’s very interesting—I wish we had time but we don’t have time. But, Tom, it didn’t begin in Islamic countries. They have some mathematics and astronomy observations and so forth, but real science, getting into the atom and the understanding of this whole thing, it began in Christian areas!

Now I’m not saying they were all Christians. Most of the founders of the scientific theories that we still go by today, they were Christians. They certainly were theists.

Now, along came Darwin. Darwin’s purpose was to destroy belief in God. That’s the whole reason he came up with this idea: We’ve got to explain how man got here without God. Okay? Freud, he came right along on his coattails, and, “Yes, this is the way, and now we will explain even behavior without God.”

So, what happened? It permeated the schools. It’s astonishing, Tom, because there is an innate belief in man that God exists. I’ve traveled quite a bit in the Soviet Union back in the Iron Curtain days. For 70 years they tried to stamp out all belief in God. They couldn’t do it in 70 years. And even today, in spite of the fact that atheism is dominant on radio, television, in our schools, medical schools, philosophy, science, and so forth—still, when they take a poll, 92-95 percent of Americans still believe in God. Okay?

But anyway, what I’m trying to say is we’ve had an influence that has permeated society from our schools, from grammar schools, and TV shows, and all the way that has undermined confidence in the Bible and belief in God.

Furthermore, science has become a god that is worshipped. “We blew it,” is what the Christians would say. We blew it when it came to evolution. We said, no, evolution wasn’t biblical, but now the church is coming around. The Catholic Church says it’s biblical. For example, Baylor, their science department says, “Evolution is established! We’re going to stick with that, This is science.”

Okay, so what does the church need to build back its self-esteem? We need some scholars. We need to get science on our side. What do you know—Jesus was a scientist! Well, Mary Baker Eddy said so. First Church of Christ Scientists, wow! And we can be scientific, we can get our PhDs, because psychology is science!

Tom, I’m a little bit older than you are, and I can tell you, when I had to take my—well, you were forced to take an introductory course in psychology, and they called it “mental hygiene” in those days. I can tell you, the atmosphere on the campus, we thought anybody who majored in psychology—I’m just talking about the average student—the psych professors, these guys are loonies! They got into this because they couldn’t figure themselves out, and somehow they were trying…. Tom, that was the beginning. Now, oh wow! We’re going to have a conference, and we’re going to have a Christian psychologist address this! Today, Christian psychologists have become the big authorities on the Bible! Wait a minute!

So, you asked me a question. I think part of it is the worship of science. Psychology claims to be a science—it is not. You know, there have been studies to that. We get back into that later. But the church, we can hold our heads up now in academia. We’ve got PhDs, and the Bible is scientific after all.

Tom: Dave, it’s certainly a matter of pride, there isn’t any doubt about that, but it’s also the flesh. Now, the world has been attracted to the idea that science was going to solve all of its problems, right?

Dave: Without God.

Tom: Oh, of course, that’s the idea. Yet Christians, even evangelicals, they want their problems solved. And if they’ve bought the idea that science has some answers, and that psychology or psychotherapy, psychological counseling is scientific, they’re going to jump on that, because they, like the world, want their problems solved.

Dave: And they want to have science on their side, see? Science—oh, we worship science.

You know, Tom, I’m a CPA, Certified Public Accountant. I can remember as a young boy, my parents—he was a preacher, in fact, who was a CPA—and I can remember, Wow, you look up to a CPA! Oh my goodness, the guy never makes a mistake, because he signs his name to examine the books of a bank, and so forth, and—wow! Well, you get to be a CPA, you find out some of the guys barely pass the CPA exam, and they do make mistakes. Sometimes they get sued for mistakes. It’s the same thing with scientists. Scientists are little boys and girls who grew up, they went to university, they got degrees, they gathered a lot of information in a narrow field, most of them—much of that information was wrong, okay? Especially when you get into genetics.

Richard Dawkins…or let’s take Francis Crick, who was the discoverer, to some extent, of the language of DNA. And what does he say? He wrote a book titled, The Astonishing Hypothesis, and right away, you know, he calls it astonishing because it’s contrary to anybody’s common sense. At the very beginning, he says, “You’re just a bag of molecules. That’s all you are. You think you make decisions, you think you have a sense of truth, or whatever. No, that’s just an illusion that you have. You’re just a bag of molecules.” Okay?

Now, this is basically what Freud said. It’s stimulus response, like B. F. Skinner: you just have learned behavior; you’re just programmed to act this way.

And of course, Tom, one of the worst things that has happened, the parental authority and the respect and love for parents has been totally undermined by psychology and the secular world. Your parents didn’t know anything. No, we’re the new generation, and so forth.

So you asked me: Why does the church go for it? Well, we want to be modern. We want to be scientific. We want to hold our heads up in the world of academia. And, Tom, I’ve seen it—I’m old enough! I remember good Bible schools (that’s what they were called in those days), they wanted to be recognized. They wanted to have PhDs teaching the course. And then, you know, the downward path to get credentialed. Well, who’s going to credential you?

Tom, I can never get out of my mind—I can’t forget the headlines on the bulletin that came out from Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, what did it say, in big letters? CREDENTIALED. Wow! And then it goes on to explain the on-site investigation team from the American Psychological Association has been here, they’ve examined our courses, and so forth. And they’ve even said that in spite of our religious bearings, you know, bias, we passed, and we do everything just the way they want it done! Credentialed! By whom? You’ve got Satan’s imprimatur. And, Tom, I’m beginning to get a little angry, but anyway, that is what has happened.

So the church wants to…. Go to a Christian bookstore, look at the books you’ve got, and, Tom, doctor. Doctor this and doctor that, doctor so and so, and the church wants to have doctors on its side, and Jesus said, “Don’t be called rabbi.”

Tom: Well, it’s a doctorate in, as we’ve been saying, and we can…in this series we’re going to be giving you documentation for everything that we’re saying here, either from the Scriptures, first and foremost, but also from the researchers.

Dave, on the other hand, you know, we’re talking right now about why Christians are attracted to psychotherapy, to becoming a psychotherapist, and so on, and there’s a sense—I think it’s strong delusion, which we’ll support in the weeks to come—but it’s a fact that many (especially) young people, get into psychology because they’re under the delusion that it really helps people. And they’re sincere; they want to help people.

Dave: Right, right. They want to—Tom, I talk to university students, and I say, “What are you majoring in?”

“Well, I’m majoring in psychology.”

“Oh, why did you go in for that?”

“Well, because I want to help people.” And as you said, they start out that way: they have a genuine concern. They want to help others, and they have been deceived into thinking that psychology has the answers and that it can do it.

So this is another reason why the church has gotten into psychology—it will help us! We can do a better job—pastoral counseling. Let the pastor go back and get a PhD in psychological counseling, then he’ll be more qualified.

Tom: So, Dave, with this sincerity, I’m afraid we have to attach a deceit here as well. For example, Princeton Review, very prestigious, tells us that the number two most popular choice among university students, college university students, is psychology, and that goes as well for so-called Christian universities and colleges. Now, part of the deceit here is that why would a Christian university—let’s say even an evangelical, would profess to be an evangelical, like Wheaton or Liberty, and so on—why would they offer courses in which the basic concepts are antithetical to what they claim to believe? I’ll tell you why. Because, for every student that they can draw, that’s money in their bank. This is no conspiracy kind of thing—every university needs to attract students. The more students you have the more the coffers of the university are filled. If a Christian university decides, No, we can’t offer psychological counseling as an option of courses, as a discipline, they are going to eliminate the number two most popular career choice among students that enter. And they’re not going to get those students, and it’s going to cost them financially. That’s another part of the problem here.

Dave: Yeah, Tom, it’s a delusion, as you said. We give people credit for sincerity, but after a while you have to begin to question.

I remember an article in Focus on the Family. James Dobson said—it’s right there in the magazine; if anyone doubts it, we can give you the reference. And James Dobson said, “Psychology would be a wonderful course, a wonderful career for a Christian to take up, study for and prepare for…” now, here are his words, “…provided that their faith is strong enough to withstand the humanism to which they will be exposed.”

Now, why must I go to the humanists? Why must I risk my faith? And, Tom, I could tell you of Christian, so-called, young people who went into psychology and they lost their faith. They denied God; they became atheists. But why would I go to the humanists in order to find out how to counsel people from the Word of God?

Now, you remember the quote that we often give Bruce Narramore, and he just says—he doesn’t deny it—he says, “It was humanistic psychologists Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers who first made us aware of the need of self-love and self-esteem.”

Now, what he is saying is, “No one in 1900 years, studying the Bible on their knees—not Spurgeon, not Calvin, not Luther, you name them….” Wesley and Whitfield, and some of these men, they didn’t go for this! They never found that in the Bible. In fact, the Christian psychologist never found it in the Bible. That’s why Bruce Narramore says, “We learned it from the humanists.” Okay?

So, James Dobson says, “You’re going to have to learn this from the humanists.”

Tom, let me just point out simply. Why are you going to have to learn it from the humanists? Because if you’re going to have a license and you’re going to hang up a license and you’re going to get clients now, out there in the world—well, I don’t care if you call yourself a Christian psychologist, and you’re only working on the staff of a church, you must pass the same exams in the same courses in universities, whether they’re a Christian university or a secular one. You must pass the same exam to get the state license that everybody else does. Okay? So what is that going to do? It’s going to undermine the faith of that person who has been absorbed, they’ve been inundated, they’ve been soaking in these godless series in order to pull out some golden nugget of truth that will assist them in applying the Bible. It makes no sense, Tom.

Tom: Well, Dave, it’s worse than that—it’s a direct rejection of what the Bible teaches. The Bible doesn’t teach to promote, enhance, to build, to love self; it talks about denying self.

Dave: Amen.

Tom: Moreover, Bruce Narramore, when he quotes Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, let’s take a look at the so-called pillars of psychology. These men were anti-Christian to the core.

Dave: And their lives were a mess.

Tom: Without a doubt! As a matter of fact, most of their concepts and theories were based on their own problems, the problems that they had individually.

Now, what does the Scripture say? Let’s start with Psalm 1: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly.”

Dave: Amen.

Tom: Now, how can somebody who calls themselves a Christian say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, but Freud had some good ideas, or Jung had some….” You know, these men were unbelievable in terms of their hatred for Christianity.

Dave: And their messed-up lives.

Tom: Exactly.

Dave: So we’re not going to turn to that. It’s like—it reminds me, Tom, of Jeremiah 2. God says, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and they have dug themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water.” God says, “Even the heathen didn’t do that! They’ve got false gods and they stick with their false gods. Israel, you’ve had the true God that you have professed to follow—I’ve done miracles for you, and you have turned from me to the idols of the nations, and they can’t help anyone.”

So, Tom, it breaks your heart to see what has happened in the church.