Therapy and Commodity
In this chapter the logical and psychological
consequences of the decentralization and privatization of authority are
considered. The focus of the first section, The
Rise of the Therapeutic Culture,[1]
will be upon the cultural and theological shift from thinking about divine
authority in terms of morally binding categories, to thinking about it as a
source of psychological well-being with no regard to questions about truth or
authority. This shift corresponded historically and intellectually with the rise
of romanticism and its by-product, psychoanalysis. This would further erode the
relevance of truth and authority and would encourage cultural narcissism.
The second section, Consumerism
as a Cultural Characteristic, attention will be paid to the reality of
consumerism as the ‘world-view’ of Americans generally and an important
methodological component in much of modern American Evangelicalism. The
colossal flood of information from the behavioral sciences about the human
condition and consumer-oriented marketing strategies, have tempted many
evangelical leaders uncritically to accept and implement that information
without clear biblical or theological justification for doing so. A significant
degree of attention will be placed upon the origins of ‘need’ and the agenda of
corporate and cultural elites to create needs—correspondingly a market-that may
not be otherwise legitimate.
This section (as well as chapter three) will seek to
connect consumer-oriented economic theory in the business community with that
which is utilized in much of the methodology of American Evangelicalism and is
antithetical to traditional understandings of divine authority.
The Rise of the Therapeutic Culture
This rise of the Therapeutic Culture should not be
understood as a distinctively American phenomenon any more than the
Enlightenment is. A therapeutic culture is really the natural outgrowth of the
Enlightenment agenda and the effects it has on notions of truth, authority and
the Self, regardless of where it is implemented. There are a number of ways to
define Enlightenment (not withstanding Kant’s rather polemical one), depending
upon the context in which it is discussed. For our purposes, Crane Brinton’s
definition is a suitable one: “the belief that all human beings can attain here
on earth a state of perfection hitherto in the West thought to be possible only
for Christians in a state of grace, and for them only after death.”[2]
The Enlightenment generation believed above all things that the objective
rational mind, properly educated, could attain harmony and happiness
independent of the dictates of religious or cultural authority. The next
generation of Romantic thinkers, on the other hand, tended to stress intuition
and feeling rather than reason as the ultimate pathway to truth, goodness and
happiness. As Toulmin suggests, “romanticism never broke with rationalism:
rather, it was rationalism’s mirror-image. Descartes exalted a capacity for
formal rationality and logical calculation as the supremely ‘mental’ thing in
human nature, at the expense of emotional experience.”[3]
Yet both had one very important detail in common: a manifold distrust of and,
in fact, hostility toward authority and tradition. Authority and tradition, in
Romanticism, was devoid of any external referent and, therefore, understood as
useless in bringing about the perfection of mankind. The Romantics sought a new
source for truth, values and meaning, finding it in the autonomous Self. In the
Romantic project, truth is not a search carried out for its own sake, but
rather made for the betterment of the individual. Consequently, the
intellectual dimensions of truth and the moral understandings of the good are
thought of in explicitly therapeutic terms, producing a culture that seeks the
betterment of the individual as an end in itself.
Romanticism as an intellectual movement was not so much a
reaction to the stiff rationalism of the Enlightenment as it was a development
of the Enlightenment. The Self was still seen as autonomous and reason
sufficient to discover truth about reality and arrive as self-evident moral
judgments. Yet the important development that took place challenged the mind’s
ability to apprehend reality directly, the thing-in-itself
directly. The first challenge came from Scotsman David Hume in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
(1751), in which both English empiricism and Continental rationalism received
the first of their most devastating critiques. Hume would mount a crippling
assault on the notion that causality is readily demonstrated by nature. This
was indeed significant because up to this point the existence of God was a
question not of faith in a specially mediated revelation, but rather rational
certainty based on the principle of causality. According to Hume, if the
principle of causality is not mediated through our impressions of
reality—objects observed-then how can we rationally justify it?[4]
Furthermore, if the existence of God is established according to causality, as
Aquinas and Descartes assert, then what rational justification is there to
believe in God? Commenting generally on Hume, Bertrand Russell observes that
“Hume’s philosophy, whether true or false, represents the bankruptcy of
eighteenth century reasonableness.”[5]
Yet the Prussian Immanuel Kant would mount the most devastating critique of
eighteenth century rationalism.
Kant would take Hume as his launching pad, critiquing the
rationalism of the day to a degree unprecedented even by Hume. His critique
would be so effective that it initiated what most believe to be an
‘epistemological revolution.’ Kant had formally believed that knowledge began
with reason, but was “awakened from his dogmatic slumbers”[6] by
the writings of David Hume, ultimately affirming the origin of knowledge in experience.
However, Kant was not an Empiricist in the same sense as was Locke, Berkeley
and Hume. Kant added a new dimension that would radically alter the course of
Western thought, forever changing the way the modern world thought about
knowledge. “Though all our knowledge begins with experience,” writes Kant, “it
does not follow that it all arises out of experience.”[7]
Kant went on to explain that impressions of experience only provide the
occasion for what our own faculty of knowledge supplies from itself. When the mind perceives the
outside world (what Kant calls the synthetic
element), it is then processed by the mind (the a priori element). In the perception of the raw material of
experience, the mind employs the forms of intuition of time and space, making
use of the categories of Quality,
Quantity, Relation and Modality.[8]
The raw data of experience is arranged and formed according to these
categories. Consequently, the mind does not perceive things as they are in
themselves, or as Kant put it, “while much could be said a priori as regards the form of appearances, nothing whatsoever can
be asserted of the thing in itself,
which may underlie these appearances.”[9]
According to Kant, all ‘knowledge’ is to some extent illusory, being shaped by
our own ‘habits of the mind.’ As some have said, Hume handed Kant the problem
of knowledge and Kant handed it back as if it were the solution. For Kant, the
objects of time and space (phenomena)
are known only as the mind perceives them, but anything that transcends time
and space (noumena) is beyond the
capacity of the mind. Accordingly, questions about God through the
implementation of reason cannot be answered. Kant would go on in his critique
to show the implausibility of casual arguments for the existence of God, and in
the process would drive the final nail into the coffin of a rationally
justified God.[10]
Though Kant would humble the claims of seventeenth
century rationalism, he would discover the amazing powers of imagination, in
which the Self imposed its forms on the random facts of experience. The
creative Self, espoused by Kant was not Descartes’ self-conscious ‘I’ that
perceived reality as it is, but rather the ‘transcendental ego’ that gives
meaning and order to the facts of experience, and in some sense creates reality. The concept of Self,
according to Kant, was placed at the center in an unprecedented way. The
individual’s perception of reality was as important—and often more
important—than what corresponds with reality itself. Thus, the intellectual
foundations of Romanticism and its attendant therapeutic understanding of
knowledge and religion as laid.
Romantic Christianity
In his book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966),
Philip Rieff defines the therapeutic culture as a “cultural revolution fought
for no other purpose than greater amplitude and richness of living itself.”[11] Roger
Lundin defines the therapeutic culture as a culture
in which questions of ultimate
concern—about the nature of the good, the meaning of truth, and the existence
of God—are taken to be unanswerable and hence in some fundamental sense
insignificant. A therapeutic culture focuses upon the management of experience
and environment in the interest of that manipulatable sense of well-being.[12]
The therapeutic culture, therefore, is one in which all
notions of truth, goodness, and beauty are matters derived not from external
authorities or traditions, but rather are derived by Self for the Self. The
Self and its sense of well-being and fulfillment is the beginning and the end
of all intellectual, moral and aesthetic considerations.
It should not be understood, however, that the Romantics
were intolerant to all religion. “The Romantic enterprise,” writes Meyer
Abrams, “was an attempt to sustain the inherited cultural order against what to
many writers seemed the imminence of chaos; and the resolve to give up what one
was convinced one had to give up of the dogmatic understructure of
Christianity, yet to save what one could save of its experiential relevance and
values.”[13]
The Romantics, consequently, were not hostile to religion per se, but simply to a particular type of religion, that which
asserts itself as the source of authority by which individuals are
intellectually and morally bound. A tolerated religion is one that lends its
symbols to the aggrandizement of the Self. This new understanding of the role
of religion is poignantly seen in William Butler Yeats’ A Prayer for My Daughter,
I have walked and prayed for
this young child . . .
Considering that, all hatred
driven hence,
The soul recovers radical
innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrightening,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will
Religion, with its attendant symbols, becomes, in the
therapeutic model, not the source of authority in matters of truth and
morality, but rather a tool by which the individual may attain a state of
perfection as it is defined by that
individual. God’s will, traditionally thought of as morally binding on all
and immutable, is now simply the expression of the desires of the Self. The
poet Matthew Arnold emulated this in his The
Strayed Reveller, “. . . such a price the gods exact for song: to become
what we sing.” And so to the Romantics, with their therapeutic concerns,
theology becomes a mere subset of anthropology, being explicated not according
to authoritative texts, but by inward emotions and dispositions.
In the field of hermeneutics, following the Kantian
paradigm, the effects of Romanticism were no less damaging. A ‘reader-response’
theory of hermeneutics was already beginning to take hold, in which the reader
“brings meaning to the text,” a meaning that serves the therapeutic interests
of the reader.[14]
Therefore, whatever authority the text had was, in the Romantic tradition,
privatized. This, coupled with the advent of the historical-critical school of
biblical exegesis, would lead to associating hermeneutics with the search to
make discredited texts relevant to contemporary skeptical readers, rather than
with the task of explaining authoritative commands.[15]
In this new intellectual and religious climate, theologians
like Friedrich Schleiermacher would seek new ways to reach what he called the
‘cultural despisers,’ or what is called in our day the ‘unchurched.’ These were
people who had little inclination to seek religious answers to the questions
raised by our earthly existence. In Schleiermacher’s speech to them he says,
“Suavity and sociability, art and science have so fully taken possession of
your minds that no room remains for the eternal holy Being that lies beyond the
world.”[16]
To these ‘cultured despisers’ religion was at best irrelevant and at worse
erroneous. Schleiermacher, therefore, would engage in a method that would make
the Christian message more relevant and palatable to them, fashioning the
message in ever more appealing forms, calling on his audience to look inward to
the “interior of a pious soul and seek to understand its inspiration . . . to
turn from everything usually reckoned religion, and fix your regard on the
inward emotions and dispositions, as all utterances and acts of inspired men
direct.”[17]
Whether or not Schleiermacher was deliberate in undermining the authority if
the Scriptures is unknown, but the result is clearly a diluted role of
authority in the life of the church, if it retained a role at all. Lundin aptly
observes,
In Christian proclamation under
the influence of Romanticism, the new understanding of hermeneutics led to a
preoccupation with the status of the audience to be addressed with the gospel.
Pressured to demonstrate the relevance of Christain faith to its ‘cultured
despisers’ (Schleiermacher’s memorable phrase), many Christian interpreters in
the Enlightenment and romanticism pared the biblical narrative into an
appealing shape in their attempts to appeal to an educated and often cynical
audience. Whether they were promoting a rational or a romantic God, these early
modern interpreters were often willing to spend the capital of Christian belief
in exchange for earning high interest in the marketplace of intellectual
currency.[18]
The Christian message, therefore, was increasingly shaped
and modified according to the present needs of the audience addressed, giving
rise to what would characterize liberal Christianity for over a hundred years: the sovereignty of felt need as defined by
the authoritative Self. Having broken the older outward forms of external
authority and objective truth, the theologians of the early nineteenth century
would increasingly be replaced by their logical historical successors, the
psychologists. “By this time,” writes Rieff, “men may have gone too far, beyond
the old deception of good and evil, to specialize at last, wittingly, in
techniques that are to be called ‘therapeutic,’ with nothing at stake beyond a
manipulatable sense of well-being.” This, says Rieff, “is the unreligion of the
age, and its master science.”[19]
Enter the Psychologists
If Rieff is correct that a healthy society is a complex
of controls; morally binding
imperatives, and releases; methods to
enable the individual to cope with those moral imperatives held in tension, the
church, in its historical function, fulfilled both roles.[20]
The controls being mediated through the special revelation of God, and the
releases being performed by the community of faith through encouragement and
support. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, specializes in releases void of
morally binding controls. This is due to the fact that psychoanalysis assumes
the amoral role of science, a discipline concerned with facts not values or
morality. Science is analytical not revelatory, its practitioners analyzing
moralizing symbols not asserting them.
However, the psychologizers would consciously attempt to
usurp traditional controlling institutions, like the church, through the
implementation of what Rieff calls ‘god-talk.’ Sigmund Freud would speak of the
‘unconscious’ as that ‘First Cause,’ the existence of which is unproved, but
must, nonetheless, be believed in as both fundamental to and inaccessible to
experience.[21]
C.G. Jung would be the prophet of the ‘subterranean’ god; that suppressed
aspect of divinity laying in the unconsciousness of all men.[22]
‘Life’ itself would be the god of Wilhelm Reich, seen in the cosmic energy
Orgone and opposes all spiritual principles.[23]
According to these psychoanalysts, ‘God’ is no longer metaphysical or even meta-religious,
but is, an internal force inherent in every
individual. Under this rubic,
psychoanalysis assumes the role of both release and control, seeking to release
individuals from traditional controls while at the same time covertly invoking
new ones. It is precisely at this level that psychoanalysis becomes the logical
and historical successor of the romantic Christianity of Schleiermacher and his
call inward. One must remember, however, that Nietzsche and Marx were as much
to blame as Schleiermacher, but it was he who redefined the religious task, and thus prepared the
church for the new dogma of the psychologizers.
While much of these new trends were taking place on the
European continent, they were profoundly influencing the character and
methodology of American Christianity. American pragmatism, always preoccupied
with the usefulness of language, was at the same time skeptical about its
ability to reveal truth or serve as an instrument of moral obligation. Such an
environment would serve as fertile ground for the new dogma of psychoanalysis.
So successful was psychoanalysis in America, that Rieff dubbed it the
“psychological society.” Freed from the oppressive political and religious
authorities of England, the American Self would soar to new heights of
subjectivity, the new dogma of psychoanalysis providing it with the conceptual
categories for a full-blown therapeutic theology.
American liberalism of the early twentieth century would
increasingly downplay the role of religious language as a vehicle of truth and
morality and would emphasize explicitly therapeutic, psychological
understandings. Reinhold Niebuhr, a stellar figure of American liberal
Christianity, would exhibit this new role of religious language and press it to
degrees that would have no doubt even made Freud blush. Throughout his writings
he places great emphasis on the symbolic
power of the resurrection to assure us that God redeems and fulfills the course
of human history. Yet he refuses to acknowledge it is a fact or an event that
took place in reality. Rather he speaks of it as a symbol, a hope or an idea.[24]
In fact, in a letter he wrote to Norman Kemp Smith in 1940, he stated, “I have
not the slightest interest in the empty tomb or physical resurrection.”[25]
For Niebuhr the word ‘resurrection’ had and needed no correspondence to
reality, but as a symbol the
resurrection has great explanatory
power in illustrating our faith in the meaningfulness of life.
Niebuhr’s theology has clear parallels with the broader
cultural tradition of romanticism. A contemporary British novelist, Iris
Murdoch, indicated,
It is equally interesting that
after a period of irreligion or relative atheism there have been signs of a
kind of perceptible religious renewal in certain changes in theology. In
England one is experiencing a demythologization of theology which recognizes
that many things normally or originally taken as dogmas must now be considered
myths. In this there is something which might have a profound impact on the
future which, for the ordinary person, might return religion to the realm of
the believable.[26]
The bargain offered by Murdoch to the church is not
essentially different than that offered by Schleiermacher: If the church gives up its claims to authority and truthfulness by
discarding antiquated dogmas, then the people, the “ordinary persons,” will
remunerate the church with their approval. Such a bargain, not to mention
the assumptions on which it is based, is highly objectionable. It is indeed a
sad state of affairs, when the church feels compelled to jettison its dogma for
the sake of modern perceptions of it. Yet jettison it they did. Twentieth
century liberal Christianity is a long history of accommodation to the reigning
paradigms of science and epistemology, for the sake of the application of
biblical ‘truths’ to the angst of modern society, without maintaining a
theological commitment to the authority of the Bible in any intellectually or
morally binding sense. Admittedly, biblical teaching must be applied to the
lives of those who sit under it living in the present, but it must not be
reduced to application alone. In this line of thinking, Christian dogma may
comfort the soul and help to organize our categories of thought, but it
ultimately loses its power to reveal
and to speak in a binding fashion. As
Lundin aptly predicts, “When all knowledge becomes application, eventually
there may be nothing left to apply.”
In a therapeutic culture, language, and more particularly
for our purposes, religious language, is seen only as an extension of human
need and when one way of speaking no longer seems useful—for instance, grace,
forgiveness, redemption, or God—then one must drop that vocabulary and take up
one which is more effective in the pursuit of human contentment and
fulfillment. In the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first decade
the twenty-first century such is certainly the case in many church growth
strategies. One need only look at the
stark contrast between the language, theological content and application of
Christian preaching 200 years ago and today to see the influence that
therapeutic culture has had on Christian proclamation.
If Rieff is correct when he says that a “therapeutic
culture focuses upon the management of experience and environment in the
interest of that manipulatable sense of well-being,” then it becomes quite
clear that modern American Evangelicalism has made a market out of a
therapeutic understanding of Christianity. This becomes increasingly more evident
as preaching focuses on how a particular sermon or ministry will enhance or
improve your sense of well-being, self-esteem, happiness, etc. While it must be
admitted that the gospel, historically understood will improve one’s sense of
well-being, how is this pursuit rooted in truth or morally binding
propositions? Furthermore, who defines what ‘well-being’ looks like? Is it a
universal authoritative text or the new dogma of the behavioral sciences? In
light of the pervasive biblical illiteracy that permeates American culture and
the deep inroads made by modern psychoanalysis and the marketing of pop-psychology,
the answer is self-evident.
This is not to say that an authoritative text (i.e. the
Bible) is not used, it is; but that is essentially the problem—it is used. American Evangelicals who have
sought to augment their evangelistic strategies, preaching and counseling with
the new tools provided by the behavioral sciences, have allowed those sciences
to define the causes of human discontent, unhappiness and depression, etc., and
then have turned to the Bible for the answers. While this may seem harmless on
the surface, it fails to take into account that the Bible, the divine and authoritative text, provides not only the answers to
those problems, but it also defines the causes as well. The cause of such
problems, for instance, is vastly different than that advanced by the Bible.[27]
This uncritical acceptance of psychotherapy and the behavioral sciences can be
seen when James Dobson states,
In a real sense, the health of
an entire society depends on the ease with which the individual members gain
personal acceptance. Thus, whenever the keys of self-esteem are seemingly out of reach for a large percentage of
the people, as in twentieth century America, then widespread “mental illness,”
neuroticism, hatred, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, and social disorder will
certainly occur.[28]
What’s instructive about this quote is how Dobson roots
the problems of society in concepts found not in the Bible, but from modern
psychotherapy and the behavioral sciences. This is an extremely dangerous trend
and deeply undermines the Bible as an authoritative revelation. When the
behavioral sciences are allowed to define the questions raised by human
experience, the Bible is reduced to a fishing pond in which therapeutic
preachers fish for pithy simplistic antidotes shaped to instill a vague sense
of well-being. And the ‘converts’ of these preachers are taught to evaluate the
Bible on the basis of the psychological usefulness of its propositions rather
than its truth revealing, morally binding characteristics.
David Wells has observed, “The psychologizing of life
cuts the nerve of evangelical identity because the common assumption beneath
the Self movement is the perfectibility of human nature and this assumption is
anathema to the Christian gospel.”[29]
Alasdair McIntyre laments this trend because it undermines the desire and
capacity to think. Where questions of the moment were once settled according to
their correspondence with truth [which requires thinking], now they are settled
by how people feel about them. “The
prospects of settling questions by reasoned deliberation and debate have
greatly dimmed, because, in the end, the collapse of belief in truth and the
habit of listening to the Self have united to destroy what academic life once
demanded.”[30]
It is indeed ironic that while the psychotherapists took
on a ‘language of faith’ in their therapeutic endeavors, American evangelicals took
on the language, methods and dogma of the psychologizers in theirs. While it is
perhaps an overstatement to say that ‘therapeutic evangelicals’ are not
concerned with truth and morality, the language they use and the methods they
employ suggest that these concerns no longer occupy the place of priority that
they once did.
[1]
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the
Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 196).
[2]
Crane Brinton, The Shaping of the Modern
Mind (New York: New American Library, 1959), 113.
[3]
Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden
Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), 148.
[4] David
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New
York: Penguin Books, 1984), 126-131. When we speak of cause and effect, we mean
that A causes B. But to Hume experience only furnishes contiguity, A and B are always close together; priority of time, A, the “cause,” always precedes B,
the “effect”; and constant conjunction, we always see A followed by B. Though
these impressions are valid there is nothing in them that suggest a “necessary”
connection between A and B. Thus causality is not a quality in
the objects we observe but is rather a “habit of association in the mind
produced by the repetition of instances of A
and B.” See Stumpf, Philosophy, 293.
[5]
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 698.
[6]
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future
Metaphysics (1783).
[7]
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.
Trans, Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 41.
[8] Ibid.,
113.
[9] Ibid.,
87. In a Kantian understanding of epistemology, we see the world “through
rose-colored glasses,” perceiving things not as they truly are, but as our
minds tell us they are.
[10]
It is important to note that Kant did not completely slam the door on God. Kant
was no atheist; he simply desired to place the existence of God on a more sure
footing, that being from the standpoint of his “moral imperative.”
[11]
Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic,
241.
[12]
Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation,
5-6.
[13]
Meyer Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism:
Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971),
68.
[14] This
tendency had a pronounced emphasis in literature and the arts, which in the
words of Matthew Arnold, “will nourish us in growth towards perfection.” By the
mid twentieth century this understanding would expand seeing the poet’s task as
“not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and
possessed by the human mind.” Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 32-33.
[15]
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 7. Roger Lundin
writes, “In many ways, romanticism in literature and theology was a dramatic
effort to snatch the ethical, aesthetic, and emotional relics of the Christian
faith from its metaphysical house, which was being consumed by the flames of
skepticism” (see Lundin, The Culture of
Interpretation, 39).
[16]
Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers,” in
Friedrich Schleiermacher: Pioneer of
Modern Theology, ed. Keith W. Clements (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991),
67.
[17]
Ibid., 74.
[18]
Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation,
39-40.
[19]
Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic,
13.
[20] This
theory of culture is at best a generalization of modern sociology, but for our
purposes it is instructive in understanding the role that psychoanalysis would
play in seeking to replace Christianity as a “therapeutic community” that
evoked controlling morality.
[21]
Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the
Moralist (London: Victor Gollancz LTD, 1959).
[22]
Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic,
110.
[23]
Wilhelm Reich, Selected Writings: An
Introduction to Orgonomy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 469.
[24]
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny
of Man, vol. 2: Human Destiny
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 311-312.
[25]
Quoted in Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr:
A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 215.
[26]
Quoted in Peter S. Hawkins, The Language
of Grace (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1983), 134-135.
[28] James
Dobson, Hide or Seek (Revell, 1974),
12-13. James Davidson Hunter provides the following critique: “The ambivalence
of faith communities toward moral education could not be more clear. Many faith
communities are determined to ground moral education in biblical literature and
theological tradition; at the same time, they embrace the language and
assumptions of contemporary psychology. Because Evangelicals are among the most
self-conscious about the preservation of their orthodoxy, it is a bit ironic
that they are among the least self-conscious about their embrace of therapeutic
categories and ideals. Whatever else may be lost in this bargain, such
syncretism does provide a contemporary diction that is both relevant to the
young and easy for them to grasp. However, the fact that Evangelical
Protestantism, despite its public posturing to the contrary, is comfortable
with a therapeutic understanding of morality and moral development suggests
that its resistance to the dominant culture may, in fact, be little resistance
at all.” (James Davidson Hunter, When
Psychotherapy Replaces Religion http://catholiceducation.org/articles/civilization/cc0157.html).
[29] David
F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever
Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 178.
[30]
Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue: A Study
of Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981,
1981). Cited in Wells, No Place for Truth,
181.
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