What Psychology Might Learn from Traditional Christianity.

AuthorKonkola, Kari

Sin used to be among Christianity's most important concepts. This is understandable. The New Testament says God sent His only son, Christ, to liberate fallen humans from the suffering caused by Adam's original sin. The importance of overcoming sins is emphasized by the Bible's oft-repeated warnings about God's sometimes ferociously punishing sinners.

In spite of the central role of sin in the Bible, worry about the cardinal sins--pride, envy, anger, greed, and lechery--has largely disappeared among modern Christians. (1) The reaction of most of today's Christians can be summarized by the expression "good riddance." The "let's talk about something else" attitude toward sin has become the prevailing paradigm even among theologians.

There are several reasons for the silence that today surrounds traditional Christian sins. Possibly the most important is that, thanks to original sin, humans experience sins as instinctively pleasant. This feeling causes human beings to invent rationalizations to justify sinning. The same bias encourages us to invent reasons to ridicule and abandon all restrictions on sins.

The pleasure of sinning meets little resistance because modern readers do not find the Bible's warnings about sins overly frightening. Scientifically oriented Americans have difficulty taking seriously--still less being scared by--the idea that somewhere up in heaven an old, bearded, long-haired man in a flowing white robe watches us and punishes sinners. The "believe it if I see it" attitude extends to the idea that after our deaths the same old guy will sit in judgment and decide whether we spend eternity in the pains of hellfire or the pleasures of heaven.

Yet perhaps we should not dismiss traditional Christian sins so lightly. Is there not even scientific evidence strongly suggesting that the attitudes formerly called sins may be quite harmful? This article will present reflections on evidence from one such source. Much of modern psychology is based on discoveries made by psychiatrists and psychotherapists while observing their patients. But this is not the first time in history that a large group of professionals has been able to investigate the inner functioning of the human mind. Catholic and other confessors for centuries have had the same opportunity.

In a further parallel to modern science, the early "Christian psychotherapists" published their observations in confessors' manuals, which were printed by the hundreds of thousands as early as the late fifteenth century. Astonishingly, in spite of their huge influence, almost no research has been done on the manuals, and not a single one has been translated from Latin to English. (2) Those manuals contain abundant evidence of sins producing destructive results. This article suggests that there is much to be gained by surveying some of the confessors' discoveries about sins' "worldly" punishments. (3)

The thesis set forth here is not new. Claes Ryn long ago noted that America's elite is becoming ever prouder and that this gradual change in collective personality, or "national character," is causing many of the problems the country is experiencing. This essay uses the old psychology of sins and virtues to support this observation. (4) Recently, a more popular writer and commentator, Tucker Carlson sharply criticized America's elite in The Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. Interestingly, many of the behaviors and attitudes Carlson discusses are much the same as those to be used as case-studies of traditional sins in this article. Examples include lust for power, lack of empathy, inability to self-criticize, and the idea that "brutal revenge is the only way to peace."

This article presents possible religious and psychological explanations for the behaviors Carlson criticizes. It offers the hypothesis that members of America's modern elite may be justifying their actions with rationalizations inspired by gene-coded urges. Evidence-based arguments have practically no effect on this kind of thinking. The only way to change gene-controlled "rational reasoning" is to encourage people to use their brain to weaken the influence of the flesh on "rational" thinking (see below). This is no easy feat, but it has been accomplished many times in the past.

The use in this article of modern psychology, including evolutionary psychology, will strike many as forcing complex spiritual phenomena into categories that are too rough and mechanistic to capture their complexity and subtlety. Some philosophers are bound to view the terminology and classificatory schemes of "scientific" psychology as simplistic and reductionistic. But the purpose here is not to make sweeping, definitive claims about the overlap or coincidence of traditional religion and modem psychology but to point to apparent similarities that can be fruitfully explored.

Christian Psychology (5)

The Bible repeatedly mentions "the flesh" as the source of sins. Theologians in late medieval and early modern Europe connected the flesh to the animal-like part of human nature. The "beast in man" was a central Christian concept: in the Creation, God gave Adam's rational brain full control of the beastly flesh's sinful urges. In the Fall, the beast in man revolted and overthrew the control that had once been given. Thus, because of Adam's transgression, all of his heirs--i.e., all humans--are now born as slaves in sin, trapped by the animal-like urges of their flesh. Seeing this misery, God took pity and sent his only Son, Christ, down to earth to liberate fallen humans from the effects of Adam's transgression and from eternal suffering in the fires of hell.

We shall here leave aside the important question whether "the flesh" is best understood as animal-like urges or is better understood as a metaphor for the sinful inclinations of the human heart. Animals do not have the kind of freedom of choice and imaginative range that is distinctive to human beings.

Traditional Christianity's dualistic view of humans as a mind, which is capable of objective, evidence-based, rational thinking, and also as a body subject to animal-like urges, sounds familiar because today's evolutionary psychologists have gravitated to a similar view. The similarity is helpful in explaining the meaning of traditional Christian sins to modern readers: sins can be viewed as humans' gene-coded behaviors. Virtually all animals that live in groups--including Homo Sapiens--have a gene-coded drive to dominate, which produces status hierarchies. Christianity's sins of pride and envy can be analyzed as the psychological and behavioral effects of this drive to dominate. Gluttony, anger, and lechery correspond to the feeding, fighting, and sexual drives respectively. Although attributing sin to "the animal" in man may be ultimately unsatisfactory, traditional Christianity's view of the animal-like flesh as the deep source of much of fallen humans' behavior aligns fairly well with the latest scientific discoveries. It is understood that what follows is not so much offered as proof of specific overlap between traditional Christianity and modern psychology as possibly useful evidence of similarities that might alert modern people to the plausibility of older Christian assumptions.

The genetic roots of sin open an intriguing perspective on the practice of confession: in their effort to understand sins, confessors investigated what today resembles and is called the psychology of gene-coded behaviors. Several centuries of research has been done on a subject that evolutionary psychologists are just beginning to study. Arguably, confessors' most important discovery was that, if effective methods are used, genes' influence on human behavior can be almost totally eliminated without harmful side effects. This observation differs drastically from the current scientific paradigm, which sees genetic influence as unchangeable. (6)

The idea that genes can be "overcome"--described by theologians as crucifying/mortifying the flesh--logically produced the idea that humans exist on a continuum. At one end are people in whom rational thinking reigns supreme, and the desires of flesh/genes are so weak as to be practically non-existent. At the other end of the continuum, flesh/genes totally control behavior. The role of rational thinking is limited to finding ways to gratify flesh/genes' desires and inventing rationalizations to justify those gratifications.

The part of the old Christian psychology of sins/flesh/genes that caused most concern were descriptions of a phenomenon that theologians described with the expression "passions extinguish the light of reason" and which today might be called "gene-cognition interaction." In the old terminology, "passions" were the mechanism through which the flesh/genes influenced the mind's conscious part. This influence was thought to be massive, because passions could unconsciously control all areas of the mind: instinctive emotional reactions, prevailing thoughts, fantasies, free associations, self-evident assumptions, and the results of what people honestly believed to be their evidence-based, objective reasoning. Traditional Christianity outfreuded Freud by giving the unconscious far more power than even Freud would do. Fortunately, the mind's conscious part could be trained to detect passions' normally unconscious influence. (7) Some people had much better awareness of their deep motivations than others.

Even though they have similar views of human nature, traditional Christianity and modern evolutionary psychology disagree sharply concerning specifics. Most evolutionary psychologists believe that innate human behaviors are beneficial. They therefore advocate gratifying our "natural" desires. This assumption seems to be derived from Darwin's theory, which posits that our gene-coded behaviors have been selected over hundreds of millennia of the struggle for survival. These...

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