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Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
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This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
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Welcome to Bleeding Daylight, thanks for listening.
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You'll find hundreds more inspiring episodes waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
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I'd love to connect with you, so please follow Bleeding Daylight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
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What happens when you build a strong faith in your head and you realise it hasn't yet reached your heart?
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Can a psychologist hold a deep Christian faith and still take modern therapy seriously?
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Is there a way to bridge the gap between those who say, just open your Bible and others who tell us to just follow the science?
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These are just a few of the questions that will find answers in today's episode.
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Eric Johnson has spent over 35 years teaching psychology and counselling.
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He's also been counselling people himself for more than 25.
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He's the founder of the Christian Psychology Institute, and he's written books and dozens of papers on what it looks like to bring a Christian worldview into the counselling room.
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Eric is honest about his own story, including the messy parts.
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He came to faith as one of the last hippies, became an academic whose Christianity was mostly in his head, and then found that his marriage and family pushed him towards something deeper.
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Today, we talk healing and how God meets us in our brokenness.
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Eric, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
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Thank you.
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It's great to be here.
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There's a lot to explore in your story.
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I'm wondering if we might start with your days as a hippie, and what happened that interrupted that lifestyle for you?
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Well, the most momentous event, honestly, just to dive right in, I got my girlfriend pregnant when I was 16, and she was 16, and that just was like hitting a wall.
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At that time, I didn't feel like I wasn't really old enough even to know what I was going through.
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But as I looked back, it just rocked my world.
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We ended up giving him up for adoption, but it still rocked my world.
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I began a journey to try and make sense of my life and explored a number of different religions and kind of pop-psych stuff that was common at that time.
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But then after I had turned 18, I gave my life to Christ.
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My friend witnessed to me and told me that Christ was the way that I was looking for and didn't know it, and it proved to be the best thing that ever happened in my life.
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I hear from a number of people who explore all sorts of avenues and all sorts of religions, and then they come to that moment where they say, Jesus is the answer I've been searching for.
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What was it for you in Jesus that you saw that said, the search can end here, I found what I've been looking for?
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The biggest effect on my soul at that time was the day after I gave my life to the Lord.
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I will never forget feeling psychologically lighter, not so heavy, not so weighed down with what now I realize was shame and guilt that I had been carrying.
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At the end of the day, all the religions that I explored, it was still me doing it.
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This was one where I relinquished the control of my life over to my God, my Creator.
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That was a real game-changer psychologically, but of course, that's also the nature of the Christian faith and what God is about, that we live in dependence upon Him.
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It's proven to be psychologically beneficial besides for the fact that it's the way we were made, and the Bible reveals that's the norm.
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We know that we come to faith through grace alone, that we're offered this amazing opportunity to reconcile with God the Father through Jesus, yet we still start to believe that, but we've now got to do it all ourselves.
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Now that we're in, we've got to do it all ourselves, and Christianity becomes more of a behavior modification program.
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Did you experience that in the early days?
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Yeah, I did.
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I think that's pretty astute.
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I studied developmental psychology at Michigan State, and I carried a developmental kind of approach into the Christian life, and I was so happy as I really started studying church history in depth.
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There have been many Christian models of spiritual development over the centuries that are quite fascinating, but I think you're touching on something that is really common.
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I think of it as an early stage of the Christian life.
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After we become a believer, while God changes the direction of our life, I would say the majority of our soul and our neural networks that were formed before we became a Christian are still in place, and so while our direction has changed and we're now moving towards God rather than away from Him, which is sort of our native condition, to use the word of Augustine, original sin.
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Because of original sin, we're moving away from Him.
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That's been reversed.
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That's momentous.
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However, a lot of the same kinds of dispositions are still in place, and I think it's God's plan that it ends up taking a long time.
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It's a slow journey towards healing and becoming more like Christ and opening up more to what grace means and the implications of that.
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So I think sort of the default, after the flurry of initial Christian faith has taken hold and begins to wear off, at least for those who have been sort of radically converted like I was, and many people are, but not all people are.
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It's not a requirement for sure, but when you have that kind of a conversion, you kind of expect the fireworks to continue.
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But they don't, and that's part of God's intention that we not be looking to the gifts rather than the giver.
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Over time, God weans us from that, but we fall back upon our own resources.
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That's sort of the default position for us as broken sinners.
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That kind of leads to a new stage of the Christian life.
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That's God's intention that He move us, drive us, as it were, draw us into more a closer relationship with Him and a recognition of what the pitfalls are for being still in this fallen body, but now having the Holy Spirit in us.
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It's a mysterious, but beautiful, and I would say challenging journey.
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What was the tipping point for you to go deeper with Jesus?
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When did you come to realize that all this head knowledge is great, but I need something more?
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Yes, yes.
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I'm very grateful for the great theology that I got at the Bible college I went to, and it's continued to be a ground for my way of life.
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But I began to realize that while my behavior had changed radically when I was converted, that the selfish-oriented dispositions relationally were still there, embedded in my way of relating to people like my wife.
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And as my kids grew older, my kids, and I began to realize by the way they were reacting to me, that they were struggling with some of the things that I was doing and saying, and particularly my wife.
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That was a real wake-up call.
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I would say the face of my wife, more than anything besides the Holy Spirit, really awakened me to do deeper work.
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And that's when I began to see it's not just Bible knowledge that I need, but I need help from a kind of therapy mentor.
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And I reached out to a therapist that was recommended to me, a Christian therapist, and began a journey of what Soren Kierkegaard calls the journey of inward deepening, where my faith began to take on a depth dimension that while I searched for it, I yearned for it, I couldn't get there.
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Most of my Christianity was in my head, and then in just, like you say, behavior modification.
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There's more to it, far more to it than that.
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Once you started talking to this therapist, you were able to go to something deeper and go further on that journey.
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As you say, it's a long journey that God has us on to grow in likeness to Christ.
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We want to take that journey over the time that it needs to take and discover what it is that God is calling us into.
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But it's interesting that you went into counseling for that, because for a long time, there have been people within the church that have viewed counseling or psychology even as suspicious rather than it being a way to understand the way the mind works, the way that we act.
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They've looked at it as something that is opposite to Christianity.
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How do we make those two things meet, or should we?
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It's by no means an easy process to make sense of what you're describing.
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There are good reasons why there's controversy in the area of counseling and psychology, in my opinion.
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When I started out as a young believer, I wanted to be radical for Jesus, and so I adhered to what now I think we can call a Bible-only approach to counseling.
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I just found it didn't really go deep enough, at least the way that it was explained and taught at that time.
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I think, frankly, a lot of Bible-only counselors remain unwittingly, largely, it's an intellectual kind of approach to the faith.
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The challenge, though, that I think Bible-only counselors are pointing to is that modern psychology is a relatively recent development.
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It started in the late 1800s, and it happened to coincide with what the great Christian sociologist Christian Smith called the secular revolution that basically took over the intellectual centers of our culture, the universities in Europe and eventually the United States, so that all the disciplines became secular.
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Whereas if you go into the Middle Ages through the early modern era, the disciplines were shaped by a Christian worldview, and the Bible had a role to play in how we understood all of them.
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But that changed dramatically in the late 1800s, and we've grown up in cultures that just assume a secular orientation and exclude the Bible and God and, of course, Christianity from the get-go.
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That's not the way it's supposed to be.
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What the Christian community is called to is to retrieve its own psychology, which in a simple and beautiful form is given to us in the Bible, but then developed over the centuries by great Christians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and so on.
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At the same time, we don't want to throw out all of secular psychology because secular psychologists are made in God's image.
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They're reasonable people.
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They've done good scholarship, good research.
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A lot of the time, though, it's been, I would say, warped by their worldview.
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It's not all bad.
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Great Christians like John Calvin have pointed to the fact that if it's true that all good comes from above, from the Father of Lights, as James suggests, then we have to be able to look at the sciences and say, whether they're Christians or not, if there's truth there, that truth belongs to God.
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It's a gift of God.
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We Christians ought to be the first to try and make sense of it and recognize it.
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The challenge, and this is what makes the Christian counseling community right now fairly divided, on the one hand, there's more in God's understanding of the soul and the body-soul relations in human development than he revealed to us in the Bible.
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But what he gave to us in the Bible is the most important stuff about what it means to be a human, that God's more important than we are, and so on.
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But then the information that he's allowed human beings, most of whom haven't known him in secular psychology, that that truth has been warped.
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And Christians who, like myself, I went to a secular university, a state university, and all of that psychology was devoid of God.
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It was devoid of the most important stuff that's in the Bible, and yet it has a lot of secondary information that's really valuable and helpful for us to understand the whole picture, which of course is God's understanding.
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And for Christianity, for the Christian community, that's what we're after.
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We want the whole picture.
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Christian psychology is a project that I've been working on, and I think, as I say, we find its seeds in the Bible, developed over the centuries, and I think now's a great time to be seeking to bring it all together, to do our best to bring it all together.
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The biggest challenge, then, is to take captive the findings of secular psychology, but then to translate that into a full-orbed Christian framework that's able to really see it more like the way God sees it, where He's at the center, Jesus is the ultimate healing agent, and Christian counseling, therefore, in my opinion, it ought to be Christ-centered.
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Christ ought to be an active participant in Christian counseling, and that's going to make it different from secular counseling, of course, but it's also going to be beyond a Bible-only approach, which tends to focus on, you know, do you understand what this says?
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Now go live it, because the Bible was given to us
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primarily as a medium through which we meet God by the aid of the Holy Spirit,
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and it's in our relationship with God that the most important transformation happens, and
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it's a challenging journey, but it's been really satisfying to me throughout my career to be
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groping towards this kind of middle way, taking the best of secular psychology, but doing so
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within, ultimately, a Christian framework.
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One word that you mentioned, and I hear it bandied about a lot, and I feel that there's many people that don't fully understand the meaning of it, and that is worldview.
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When it comes to our worldview, the thing that is preeminent, the lens that we view everything through, can you explain a little of where you think worldview fits in with this Christian psychology?
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Richard Averbeck Yeah, it's absolutely foundational.
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The biggest problem of secular psychology, and I don't think I've really understood this like I do now early on, and when I was at Michigan State, I was trying really hard to be a Christian student in a secular program, but the problem with all the disciplines now, even biology, for example, is that worldview consists of a lot of different things, I've come to believe.
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It certainly includes our core beliefs, but it also includes things like the story within which we make sense of ourselves.
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Some people call that our metanarrative.
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Obviously, a secular model of evolution is the metanarrative of modern psychology.
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It also has what Christians have called an order of love, a sort of hierarchy of what we are to love most preeminently, and in a secular world, ultimately, that ultimate love is the self.
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The self is placed at the center of the universe, whereas in a Christian order of love, God's at the center, and our love of others and even of ourselves is to be subordinated to the love of God, who is the supremely most beautiful person in existence, and so we were made to live in love with him.
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That's also a part of a worldview.
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It's more complicated than just a set of beliefs, but it certainly includes a set of beliefs.
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What I'm suggesting is that a secular worldview with the self at the center and secular core beliefs and a secular evolutionary metanarrative is shaping the theories, all the psychological theories in research, how they're interpreted.
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Everything is going to be more or less warped by that self-oriented agenda.
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That doesn't mean we throw it all out.
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Our job is to interpret it in a Christian framework.
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Calvin said the Bible is to be our spectacles, our glasses, through which we interpret everything, and I think that's a genius way of thinking about one of the Bible's functions, so we want to read that.
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It's like the Bible is our reading glasses.
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We want to read it and interpret it and make sense of it in a worldview where God is at the center, he's a living God, and he's created us, newly created us, so that we are alive to God as believers.
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Now we can have a love relationship with him that we couldn't have apart from Christ's life, death, and resurrection.
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We've been raised to walk in newness of life with him, and then, of course, the metanarrative of scripture is that we were created in his image, now we're fallen and therefore warped in that way, but Christ's life, death, and resurrection gives us the possibility of a new life in Christ, leading to an eternity with God if we follow him.
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That's such a radically different worldview, and while there are so many findings that modern psychology has discovered that are a gift to everybody and ought to be received as a gift from God, but also from the secular community.
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They've done hard work.
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We want to be grateful to them for the work that they've done, but then, boy, we have to really do a good job of reinterpreting it because there's a lot more to the story than they're aware of because they have really a very limited worldview.
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It's not very interesting.
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The fact that I descended from simpler beings doesn't wake somebody up in the that I'm evolved.
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I don't think so as much as understanding that God's been on a pursuit to love me into wholeness, and he's willing to lay down his life for me so that I become his friend.
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That's a real captivating worldview, and it's intrinsically therapeutic.
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I imagine that for a lot of people, if there has been damage or trauma in their life, and that has continued to stay with them over a long period of time, it's going to take a while to reverse that thinking, to reverse what's happened before.
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We're not discounting God doing something miraculous and just taking someone out of that situation, but at the same time, as you've already mentioned, God will often take us on a journey.
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So how long are people expecting to go through a therapy or a counseling to be able to reach that deeper place with God?
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Yeah, that's a great question, and I can tell you've done some thinking about this, and I appreciate that.
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You've said it well.
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The way I understand trauma now for the bulk of the human race is it's suffering that we experienced in childhood before we developed the capacities to address it in a healthier way.
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For most of us, before we became a Christian and had Christian resources that we could use to address it in a Christian way, that suffering was of such intensity or duration or both that it led to the damage of the development of our created body-soul structures.
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So that includes the way that our neural networks developed as we were developing in childhood and into adolescence, but also then the ways that we think and interpret the world, the way that we feel about things in our emotional life, the way we relate to people, and ultimately, trauma can affect the way that we relate to God.
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Because if we grew up, say,
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with angry parents, and even if they were Christian in some sense or other, but they
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treated us in a way that didn't image God very well, but maybe it was more like pictured Satan
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unwittingly more than it did God in the sense of anger and rejection and a lack of love and
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neglect and so on, then that is going to warp the way that we see other human beings for the rest of
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our lives, the way that we relate to our spouse, for example, to our kids.
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That's what I had to awaken to.
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I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family where my parents were angry a lot of the time.
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I didn't want to be angry, but I found that I had this tendency to be subtly angry.
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I was too Christian to yell or to be physically abusive, but I could be very kind of a seething anger that my kids knew it, my wife knew it.
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I began to realize there's still anger down there, this unresolved that's not been healed yet.
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There was damage that had been done.
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As an adult, I'm responsible for how I live.
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The Bible's really clear about that, but I'm not responsible for how it developed because I was a kid.
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As children, we just receive whatever we're exposed to.
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That's the way we were created.
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I think we need to be realistic about the healing process.
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While I think you rightly said God could heal us in the snap of a finger, the blinking of an eye.
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In fact, he's going to do that when we die and go to be with him in heaven.
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In between our conversion and dying and going to be with God in heaven, it appears to me, and I think to most Christians over the centuries, is God wants to work with his created order.
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While he can overwhelm it and do miracles all the time, and he proved that to us in biblical history and especially in the life of Christ, yeah, he can do it, but he prefers to work with his created order as it was created and, to be honest, as it has fallen because he wants to bring resurrection out of the death, out of the brokenness, out of the damage that we have.
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While I prayed many times and I've commiserated with my counselees many times, oh, it's so much slower than we would like the process to be, ultimately that's a part of the healing too, is learning how to rest in God and be content and wait upon him, but not in a passive way because God has much for us to do.
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We can still grow in grace.
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We can be working with a therapist.
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There's something about meeting with a therapist that's so helpful because if they're a good therapist, they can ask good questions that we find it hard to ask ourselves.
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There's nothing like it.
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One of the most important features,
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I think, of a Christian worldview in counseling and psychology is what I call the relational
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triangle with God at the top and then us as individuals working with another skilled person,
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perhaps a skilled pastor, pastoral counselor, and that's great, a biblical counselor that's
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sensitive and understanding or a Christian mental health professional, but they can work with us at
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the horizontal level as images of God that can really help to open us up and then it works in
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tandem with God working and us working with others in the body of Christ.
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It's a beautiful system, though it may be slower than we wish.
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In the long run, it is what it is and God gives glory.
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Since I was in my 50s, I began to realize God's healing me beyond where I was at in my 30s when I first experienced the awakening that I need to go deeper psychologically and spiritually than I was able to do in my 20s and 30s.
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By the time I was in my 50s, I began to realize God is bringing substantial healing to my damage and it has an interesting interdynamic with my sinful tendencies as well because they began to be more healed as I've gotten older and I've gotten healing from my damage.
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It's a beautiful kind of interaction that has happened.
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At this point, thank God, my wife started seeing changes in me and she started speaking about it to me and to others.
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Every year since, and I just turned 70, so I'm very aware of the development
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of life and that I'm getting closer to the end of my life, whatever that is, God willing,
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but that every decade's gotten better because I've been with God's help totally, ultimately,
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all God's grace, but God's been helping me and enabling me to collaborate with Him in a way that
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I just wasn't able to do as skillfully as I am now.
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I think the locus classicus verse on that is Philippians 2, 12, and 13, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
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There's a lot for us to do, but it's all based in grace because it is God who is at work in us, both willing to do it with His good pleasure.
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That's also a beautiful part of God's therapeutic agenda with us, is Him drawing us into this collaboration, empowering us over time, equipping us, healing us, giving us wisdom, giving us a heart that loves Him more than we love ourselves.
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Compared to even as young Christians, we probably loved ourselves more than Him, even though we were saved.
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We didn't know any better.
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It's a slow, gradual journey, but God has been really good.
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I'm very, very, very thankful to Him for the journey and the story that He's given me over these decades now, over 50 years I've been a Christian.
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One of the questions I often ask people who have faced trauma, especially as a younger person, is, when did you realize this was not normal?
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Because even in abusive situations, if kids are growing up in that, they feel that that's normal until it's visiting a friend's house and it doesn't happen there, or even much later in life, realizing that the way that they were brought up was not normal or not right.
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Is a part of your journey with people helping them to realize that what they think is normal perhaps isn't?
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That's another great question.
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You really aptly kind of described the dilemma.
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We don't know what we don't know, and we're all familiar with our family of origin experiences, and that's our norm.
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That's our normal.
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Part of it is as we enter into the Christian community, I think part of the value of the church and why it's so important that we be committed to a local church, even though all local churches are filled with flawed people, you know, broken sinner saints, but we meet God there and we meet God through His people.
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We usually will see in a decent church that there are people that are healthier than I am.
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Where'd that come from?
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Why is that?
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Part of that is because they were probably raised in healthier families than we were.
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Certainly that was the case in my case.
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My parents weren't Christians and didn't know the Lord.
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They weren't very healthy psychologically or spiritually.
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One of the greatest needs of the church, I think we need to do what we can to create an ethos within the church where it's okay to be broken, to be a broken sinner.
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I mean,
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we believe that in theory because the Bible teaches it quite clearly, and Jesus hung out
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with broken sinners, so you'd think that the church would be really open to this, but what seems to
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happen for a lot of complex reasons we probably don't have time to get into, I think it's normal
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for churches to get stuck in a stage that we were talking about a little bit earlier where we know
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God wants us to be better, and so the being better becomes sort of the norm in the local church, and
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if you don't fit that mold, then there's some discomfort with your presence.
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I've seen churches work hard at trying to create an ethos that it's okay to be broken, a broken sinner.
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We're all saints.
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We're all perfect in the eyes of God.
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There is therefore now no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus.
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That's part of what makes us one body, and then the fact is everybody has
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something to learn from one another, so people who come from more broken backgrounds can learn
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what healthier family life is like and ideally can be helped with that, but the problem that
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I find with people who kind of grew up in healthier families and they are healthier
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is they kind of think that they know how to do it, but when they try and communicate it to others,
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they actually tend to be sounding kind of judgmental and rather quick to say,
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well, just do it, and it's like, well, it's not as easy for me as it sounds like it
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was for you.
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Ideally, the healthier people need to be humbled by the fact that they didn't grow
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up with much trauma, and they can learn about suffering by listening to the brothers and
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sisters who did, and so ideally in the kingdom of God, in decent local churches, there can be
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a beautiful symbiosis where we're learning how to live together and grow together and be humbled by
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each other wherever we were at because whatever good we have, we've already talked about it's
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from the Lord.
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That's how inward deepening can begin to take hold in a local church, but that's going to require some leadership, I think, and a willingness to challenge some of the kind of mores that have become normalized in the church, but they don't resemble the Christ of the Gospels as much as maybe we sometimes think they do.
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Eric, we've really just scratched the surface of what Christian counseling,
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Christian psychology can be, and so there is a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net
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so that people can get to your website and explore that further, but hopefully
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we've at least sounded the opportunity for people to realize that there is help available,
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that there is an opportunity to go deeper and to discover a deepness with God that we perhaps
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haven't before through counseling, through good Christian counseling, but I want to say thank
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you for what you're doing, and especially thank you for spending some time with me today on
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Bleeding Daylight.
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Thank you so much.
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There are many groups that I respect and I love and I've learned so much and many books that have been written that espouse kind of the stuff that we're talking about at a regularly popular level, but Christian Psychology Institute is especially aiming at working with mental health professionals and pastors to help them to develop their skills to become Christ-centered in their orientation.
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I just want to be clear, while there are many great resources for lay people, that's not our primary audience.
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We're wanting to take pastors and mental health professionals to the next level, and their understanding, so that they can be more and more beneficial to helping Christian lay people realize who they are in Christ more fully.
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Thank you so much, and it's been great talking to you.
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It's been great talking to you.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
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Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
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For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net
00:00:08,060 --> 00:00:13,200
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
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This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
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Welcome to Bleeding Daylight, thanks for listening.
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You'll find hundreds more inspiring episodes waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
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I'd love to connect with you, so please follow Bleeding Daylight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
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What happens when you build a strong faith in your head and you realise it hasn't yet reached your heart?
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Can a psychologist hold a deep Christian faith and still take modern therapy seriously?
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Is there a way to bridge the gap between those who say, just open your Bible and others who tell us to just follow the science?
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These are just a few of the questions that will find answers in today's episode.
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Eric Johnson has spent over 35 years teaching psychology and counselling.
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He's also been counselling people himself for more than 25.
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He's the founder of the Christian Psychology Institute, and he's written books and dozens of papers on what it looks like to bring a Christian worldview into the counselling room.
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Eric is honest about his own story, including the messy parts.
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He came to faith as one of the last hippies, became an academic whose Christianity was mostly in his head, and then found that his marriage and family pushed him towards something deeper.
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Today, we talk healing and how God meets us in our brokenness.
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Eric, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
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Thank you.
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It's great to be here.
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There's a lot to explore in your story.
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I'm wondering if we might start with your days as a hippie, and what happened that interrupted that lifestyle for you?
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Well, the most momentous event, honestly, just to dive right in, I got my girlfriend pregnant when I was 16, and she was 16, and that just was like hitting a wall.
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At that time, I didn't feel like I wasn't really old enough even to know what I was going through.
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But as I looked back, it just rocked my world.
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We ended up giving him up for adoption, but it still rocked my world.
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I began a journey to try and make sense of my life and explored a number of different religions and kind of pop-psych stuff that was common at that time.
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But then after I had turned 18, I gave my life to Christ.
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My friend witnessed to me and told me that Christ was the way that I was looking for and didn't know it, and it proved to be the best thing that ever happened in my life.
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I hear from a number of people who explore all sorts of avenues and all sorts of religions, and then they come to that moment where they say, Jesus is the answer I've been searching for.
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What was it for you in Jesus that you saw that said, the search can end here, I found what I've been looking for?
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The biggest effect on my soul at that time was the day after I gave my life to the Lord.
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I will never forget feeling psychologically lighter, not so heavy, not so weighed down with what now I realize was shame and guilt that I had been carrying.
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At the end of the day, all the religions that I explored, it was still me doing it.
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This was one where I relinquished the control of my life over to my God, my Creator.
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That was a real game-changer psychologically, but of course, that's also the nature of the Christian faith and what God is about, that we live in dependence upon Him.
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It's proven to be psychologically beneficial besides for the fact that it's the way we were made, and the Bible reveals that's the norm.
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We know that we come to faith through grace alone, that we're offered this amazing opportunity to reconcile with God the Father through Jesus, yet we still start to believe that, but we've now got to do it all ourselves.
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Now that we're in, we've got to do it all ourselves, and Christianity becomes more of a behavior modification program.
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Did you experience that in the early days?
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Yeah, I did.
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I think that's pretty astute.
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I studied developmental psychology at Michigan State, and I carried a developmental kind of approach into the Christian life, and I was so happy as I really started studying church history in depth.
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There have been many Christian models of spiritual development over the centuries that are quite fascinating, but I think you're touching on something that is really common.
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I think of it as an early stage of the Christian life.
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After we become a believer, while God changes the direction of our life, I would say the majority of our soul and our neural networks that were formed before we became a Christian are still in place, and so while our direction has changed and we're now moving towards God rather than away from Him, which is sort of our native condition, to use the word of Augustine, original sin.
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Because of original sin, we're moving away from Him.
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That's been reversed.
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That's momentous.
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However, a lot of the same kinds of dispositions are still in place, and I think it's God's plan that it ends up taking a long time.
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It's a slow journey towards healing and becoming more like Christ and opening up more to what grace means and the implications of that.
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So I think sort of the default, after the flurry of initial Christian faith has taken hold and begins to wear off, at least for those who have been sort of radically converted like I was, and many people are, but not all people are.
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It's not a requirement for sure, but when you have that kind of a conversion, you kind of expect the fireworks to continue.
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But they don't, and that's part of God's intention that we not be looking to the gifts rather than the giver.
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Over time, God weans us from that, but we fall back upon our own resources.
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That's sort of the default position for us as broken sinners.
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That kind of leads to a new stage of the Christian life.
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That's God's intention that He move us, drive us, as it were, draw us into more a closer relationship with Him and a recognition of what the pitfalls are for being still in this fallen body, but now having the Holy Spirit in us.
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It's a mysterious, but beautiful, and I would say challenging journey.
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What was the tipping point for you to go deeper with Jesus?
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When did you come to realize that all this head knowledge is great, but I need something more?
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Yes, yes.
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I'm very grateful for the great theology that I got at the Bible college I went to, and it's continued to be a ground for my way of life.
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But I began to realize that while my behavior had changed radically when I was converted, that the selfish-oriented dispositions relationally were still there, embedded in my way of relating to people like my wife.
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And as my kids grew older, my kids, and I began to realize by the way they were reacting to me, that they were struggling with some of the things that I was doing and saying, and particularly my wife.
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That was a real wake-up call.
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I would say the face of my wife, more than anything besides the Holy Spirit, really awakened me to do deeper work.
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And that's when I began to see it's not just Bible knowledge that I need, but I need help from a kind of therapy mentor.
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And I reached out to a therapist that was recommended to me, a Christian therapist, and began a journey of what Soren Kierkegaard calls the journey of inward deepening, where my faith began to take on a depth dimension that while I searched for it, I yearned for it, I couldn't get there.
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Most of my Christianity was in my head, and then in just, like you say, behavior modification.
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There's more to it, far more to it than that.
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Once you started talking to this therapist, you were able to go to something deeper and go further on that journey.
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As you say, it's a long journey that God has us on to grow in likeness to Christ.
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We want to take that journey over the time that it needs to take and discover what it is that God is calling us into.
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But it's interesting that you went into counseling for that, because for a long time, there have been people within the church that have viewed counseling or psychology even as suspicious rather than it being a way to understand the way the mind works, the way that we act.
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They've looked at it as something that is opposite to Christianity.
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How do we make those two things meet, or should we?
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It's by no means an easy process to make sense of what you're describing.
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There are good reasons why there's controversy in the area of counseling and psychology, in my opinion.
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When I started out as a young believer, I wanted to be radical for Jesus, and so I adhered to what now I think we can call a Bible-only approach to counseling.
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I just found it didn't really go deep enough, at least the way that it was explained and taught at that time.
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I think, frankly, a lot of Bible-only counselors remain unwittingly, largely, it's an intellectual kind of approach to the faith.
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The challenge, though, that I think Bible-only counselors are pointing to is that modern psychology is a relatively recent development.
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It started in the late 1800s, and it happened to coincide with what the great Christian sociologist Christian Smith called the secular revolution that basically took over the intellectual centers of our culture, the universities in Europe and eventually the United States, so that all the disciplines became secular.
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Whereas if you go into the Middle Ages through the early modern era, the disciplines were shaped by a Christian worldview, and the Bible had a role to play in how we understood all of them.
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But that changed dramatically in the late 1800s, and we've grown up in cultures that just assume a secular orientation and exclude the Bible and God and, of course, Christianity from the get-go.
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That's not the way it's supposed to be.
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What the Christian community is called to is to retrieve its own psychology, which in a simple and beautiful form is given to us in the Bible, but then developed over the centuries by great Christians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and so on.
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At the same time, we don't want to throw out all of secular psychology because secular psychologists are made in God's image.
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They're reasonable people.
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They've done good scholarship, good research.
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A lot of the time, though, it's been, I would say, warped by their worldview.
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It's not all bad.
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Great Christians like John Calvin have pointed to the fact that if it's true that all good comes from above, from the Father of Lights, as James suggests, then we have to be able to look at the sciences and say, whether they're Christians or not, if there's truth there, that truth belongs to God.
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It's a gift of God.
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We Christians ought to be the first to try and make sense of it and recognize it.
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The challenge, and this is what makes the Christian counseling community right now fairly divided, on the one hand, there's more in God's understanding of the soul and the body-soul relations in human development than he revealed to us in the Bible.
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But what he gave to us in the Bible is the most important stuff about what it means to be a human, that God's more important than we are, and so on.
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But then the information that he's allowed human beings, most of whom haven't known him in secular psychology, that that truth has been warped.
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And Christians who, like myself, I went to a secular university, a state university, and all of that psychology was devoid of God.
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It was devoid of the most important stuff that's in the Bible, and yet it has a lot of secondary information that's really valuable and helpful for us to understand the whole picture, which of course is God's understanding.
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And for Christianity, for the Christian community, that's what we're after.
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We want the whole picture.
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Christian psychology is a project that I've been working on, and I think, as I say, we find its seeds in the Bible, developed over the centuries, and I think now's a great time to be seeking to bring it all together, to do our best to bring it all together.
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The biggest challenge, then, is to take captive the findings of secular psychology, but then to translate that into a full-orbed Christian framework that's able to really see it more like the way God sees it, where He's at the center, Jesus is the ultimate healing agent, and Christian counseling, therefore, in my opinion, it ought to be Christ-centered.
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Christ ought to be an active participant in Christian counseling, and that's going to make it different from secular counseling, of course, but it's also going to be beyond a Bible-only approach, which tends to focus on, you know, do you understand what this says?
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Now go live it, because the Bible was given to us
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primarily as a medium through which we meet God by the aid of the Holy Spirit,
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and it's in our relationship with God that the most important transformation happens, and
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it's a challenging journey, but it's been really satisfying to me throughout my career to be
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groping towards this kind of middle way, taking the best of secular psychology, but doing so
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within, ultimately, a Christian framework.
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One word that you mentioned, and I hear it bandied about a lot, and I feel that there's many people that don't fully understand the meaning of it, and that is worldview.
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When it comes to our worldview, the thing that is preeminent, the lens that we view everything through, can you explain a little of where you think worldview fits in with this Christian psychology?
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Richard Averbeck Yeah, it's absolutely foundational.
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The biggest problem of secular psychology, and I don't think I've really understood this like I do now early on, and when I was at Michigan State, I was trying really hard to be a Christian student in a secular program, but the problem with all the disciplines now, even biology, for example, is that worldview consists of a lot of different things, I've come to believe.
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It certainly includes our core beliefs, but it also includes things like the story within which we make sense of ourselves.
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Some people call that our metanarrative.
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Obviously, a secular model of evolution is the metanarrative of modern psychology.
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It also has what Christians have called an order of love, a sort of hierarchy of what we are to love most preeminently, and in a secular world, ultimately, that ultimate love is the self.
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The self is placed at the center of the universe, whereas in a Christian order of love, God's at the center, and our love of others and even of ourselves is to be subordinated to the love of God, who is the supremely most beautiful person in existence, and so we were made to live in love with him.
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That's also a part of a worldview.
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It's more complicated than just a set of beliefs, but it certainly includes a set of beliefs.
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What I'm suggesting is that a secular worldview with the self at the center and secular core beliefs and a secular evolutionary metanarrative is shaping the theories, all the psychological theories in research, how they're interpreted.
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Everything is going to be more or less warped by that self-oriented agenda.
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That doesn't mean we throw it all out.
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Our job is to interpret it in a Christian framework.
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Calvin said the Bible is to be our spectacles, our glasses, through which we interpret everything, and I think that's a genius way of thinking about one of the Bible's functions, so we want to read that.
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It's like the Bible is our reading glasses.
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We want to read it and interpret it and make sense of it in a worldview where God is at the center, he's a living God, and he's created us, newly created us, so that we are alive to God as believers.
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Now we can have a love relationship with him that we couldn't have apart from Christ's life, death, and resurrection.
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We've been raised to walk in newness of life with him, and then, of course, the metanarrative of scripture is that we were created in his image, now we're fallen and therefore warped in that way, but Christ's life, death, and resurrection gives us the possibility of a new life in Christ, leading to an eternity with God if we follow him.
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That's such a radically different worldview, and while there are so many findings that modern psychology has discovered that are a gift to everybody and ought to be received as a gift from God, but also from the secular community.
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They've done hard work.
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We want to be grateful to them for the work that they've done, but then, boy, we have to really do a good job of reinterpreting it because there's a lot more to the story than they're aware of because they have really a very limited worldview.
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It's not very interesting.
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The fact that I descended from simpler beings doesn't wake somebody up in the that I'm evolved.
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I don't think so as much as understanding that God's been on a pursuit to love me into wholeness, and he's willing to lay down his life for me so that I become his friend.
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That's a real captivating worldview, and it's intrinsically therapeutic.
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I imagine that for a lot of people, if there has been damage or trauma in their life, and that has continued to stay with them over a long period of time, it's going to take a while to reverse that thinking, to reverse what's happened before.
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We're not discounting God doing something miraculous and just taking someone out of that situation, but at the same time, as you've already mentioned, God will often take us on a journey.
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So how long are people expecting to go through a therapy or a counseling to be able to reach that deeper place with God?
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Yeah, that's a great question, and I can tell you've done some thinking about this, and I appreciate that.
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You've said it well.
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The way I understand trauma now for the bulk of the human race is it's suffering that we experienced in childhood before we developed the capacities to address it in a healthier way.
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For most of us, before we became a Christian and had Christian resources that we could use to address it in a Christian way, that suffering was of such intensity or duration or both that it led to the damage of the development of our created body-soul structures.
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So that includes the way that our neural networks developed as we were developing in childhood and into adolescence, but also then the ways that we think and interpret the world, the way that we feel about things in our emotional life, the way we relate to people, and ultimately, trauma can affect the way that we relate to God.
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Because if we grew up, say,
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with angry parents, and even if they were Christian in some sense or other, but they
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treated us in a way that didn't image God very well, but maybe it was more like pictured Satan
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unwittingly more than it did God in the sense of anger and rejection and a lack of love and
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neglect and so on, then that is going to warp the way that we see other human beings for the rest of
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our lives, the way that we relate to our spouse, for example, to our kids.
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That's what I had to awaken to.
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I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family where my parents were angry a lot of the time.
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I didn't want to be angry, but I found that I had this tendency to be subtly angry.
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I was too Christian to yell or to be physically abusive, but I could be very kind of a seething anger that my kids knew it, my wife knew it.
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I began to realize there's still anger down there, this unresolved that's not been healed yet.
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There was damage that had been done.
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As an adult, I'm responsible for how I live.
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The Bible's really clear about that, but I'm not responsible for how it developed because I was a kid.
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As children, we just receive whatever we're exposed to.
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That's the way we were created.
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I think we need to be realistic about the healing process.
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While I think you rightly said God could heal us in the snap of a finger, the blinking of an eye.
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In fact, he's going to do that when we die and go to be with him in heaven.
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In between our conversion and dying and going to be with God in heaven, it appears to me, and I think to most Christians over the centuries, is God wants to work with his created order.
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While he can overwhelm it and do miracles all the time, and he proved that to us in biblical history and especially in the life of Christ, yeah, he can do it, but he prefers to work with his created order as it was created and, to be honest, as it has fallen because he wants to bring resurrection out of the death, out of the brokenness, out of the damage that we have.
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While I prayed many times and I've commiserated with my counselees many times, oh, it's so much slower than we would like the process to be, ultimately that's a part of the healing too, is learning how to rest in God and be content and wait upon him, but not in a passive way because God has much for us to do.
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We can still grow in grace.
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We can be working with a therapist.
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There's something about meeting with a therapist that's so helpful because if they're a good therapist, they can ask good questions that we find it hard to ask ourselves.
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There's nothing like it.
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One of the most important features,
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I think, of a Christian worldview in counseling and psychology is what I call the relational
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triangle with God at the top and then us as individuals working with another skilled person,
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perhaps a skilled pastor, pastoral counselor, and that's great, a biblical counselor that's
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sensitive and understanding or a Christian mental health professional, but they can work with us at
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the horizontal level as images of God that can really help to open us up and then it works in
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tandem with God working and us working with others in the body of Christ.
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It's a beautiful system, though it may be slower than we wish.
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In the long run, it is what it is and God gives glory.
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Since I was in my 50s, I began to realize God's healing me beyond where I was at in my 30s when I first experienced the awakening that I need to go deeper psychologically and spiritually than I was able to do in my 20s and 30s.
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By the time I was in my 50s, I began to realize God is bringing substantial healing to my damage and it has an interesting interdynamic with my sinful tendencies as well because they began to be more healed as I've gotten older and I've gotten healing from my damage.
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It's a beautiful kind of interaction that has happened.
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At this point, thank God, my wife started seeing changes in me and she started speaking about it to me and to others.
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Every year since, and I just turned 70, so I'm very aware of the development
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of life and that I'm getting closer to the end of my life, whatever that is, God willing,
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but that every decade's gotten better because I've been with God's help totally, ultimately,
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all God's grace, but God's been helping me and enabling me to collaborate with Him in a way that
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I just wasn't able to do as skillfully as I am now.
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I think the locus classicus verse on that is Philippians 2, 12, and 13, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
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There's a lot for us to do, but it's all based in grace because it is God who is at work in us, both willing to do it with His good pleasure.
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That's also a beautiful part of God's therapeutic agenda with us, is Him drawing us into this collaboration, empowering us over time, equipping us, healing us, giving us wisdom, giving us a heart that loves Him more than we love ourselves.
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Compared to even as young Christians, we probably loved ourselves more than Him, even though we were saved.
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We didn't know any better.
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It's a slow, gradual journey, but God has been really good.
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I'm very, very, very thankful to Him for the journey and the story that He's given me over these decades now, over 50 years I've been a Christian.
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One of the questions I often ask people who have faced trauma, especially as a younger person, is, when did you realize this was not normal?
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Because even in abusive situations, if kids are growing up in that, they feel that that's normal until it's visiting a friend's house and it doesn't happen there, or even much later in life, realizing that the way that they were brought up was not normal or not right.
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Is a part of your journey with people helping them to realize that what they think is normal perhaps isn't?
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That's another great question.
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You really aptly kind of described the dilemma.
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We don't know what we don't know, and we're all familiar with our family of origin experiences, and that's our norm.
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That's our normal.
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Part of it is as we enter into the Christian community, I think part of the value of the church and why it's so important that we be committed to a local church, even though all local churches are filled with flawed people, you know, broken sinner saints, but we meet God there and we meet God through His people.
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We usually will see in a decent church that there are people that are healthier than I am.
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Where'd that come from?
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Why is that?
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Part of that is because they were probably raised in healthier families than we were.
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Certainly that was the case in my case.
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My parents weren't Christians and didn't know the Lord.
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They weren't very healthy psychologically or spiritually.
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One of the greatest needs of the church, I think we need to do what we can to create an ethos within the church where it's okay to be broken, to be a broken sinner.
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I mean,
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we believe that in theory because the Bible teaches it quite clearly, and Jesus hung out
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with broken sinners, so you'd think that the church would be really open to this, but what seems to
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happen for a lot of complex reasons we probably don't have time to get into, I think it's normal
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for churches to get stuck in a stage that we were talking about a little bit earlier where we know
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God wants us to be better, and so the being better becomes sort of the norm in the local church, and
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if you don't fit that mold, then there's some discomfort with your presence.
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I've seen churches work hard at trying to create an ethos that it's okay to be broken, a broken sinner.
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We're all saints.
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We're all perfect in the eyes of God.
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There is therefore now no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus.
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That's part of what makes us one body, and then the fact is everybody has
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something to learn from one another, so people who come from more broken backgrounds can learn
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what healthier family life is like and ideally can be helped with that, but the problem that
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I find with people who kind of grew up in healthier families and they are healthier
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is they kind of think that they know how to do it, but when they try and communicate it to others,
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they actually tend to be sounding kind of judgmental and rather quick to say,
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well, just do it, and it's like, well, it's not as easy for me as it sounds like it
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was for you.
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Ideally, the healthier people need to be humbled by the fact that they didn't grow
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up with much trauma, and they can learn about suffering by listening to the brothers and
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sisters who did, and so ideally in the kingdom of God, in decent local churches, there can be
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a beautiful symbiosis where we're learning how to live together and grow together and be humbled by
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each other wherever we were at because whatever good we have, we've already talked about it's
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from the Lord.
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That's how inward deepening can begin to take hold in a local church, but that's going to require some leadership, I think, and a willingness to challenge some of the kind of mores that have become normalized in the church, but they don't resemble the Christ of the Gospels as much as maybe we sometimes think they do.
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Eric, we've really just scratched the surface of what Christian counseling,
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Christian psychology can be, and so there is a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net
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so that people can get to your website and explore that further, but hopefully
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we've at least sounded the opportunity for people to realize that there is help available,
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that there is an opportunity to go deeper and to discover a deepness with God that we perhaps
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haven't before through counseling, through good Christian counseling, but I want to say thank
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you for what you're doing, and especially thank you for spending some time with me today on
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Bleeding Daylight.
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Thank you so much.
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There are many groups that I respect and I love and I've learned so much and many books that have been written that espouse kind of the stuff that we're talking about at a regularly popular level, but Christian Psychology Institute is especially aiming at working with mental health professionals and pastors to help them to develop their skills to become Christ-centered in their orientation.
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I just want to be clear, while there are many great resources for lay people, that's not our primary audience.
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We're wanting to take pastors and mental health professionals to the next level, and their understanding, so that they can be more and more beneficial to helping Christian lay people realize who they are in Christ more fully.
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Thank you so much, and it's been great talking to you.
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It's been great talking to you.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
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Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
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For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net
