Two Worldviews: The Denial of Sin

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung

"To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn."--Isaiah 8:20

During the 19th century, the Christian church began to lose its influence in the western world. Part of that was due to the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church that offered heaven for a fee (indulgences) and promoted loyalty to its religious traditions--without guarantee--as the sole path to eternal life.

The other part of that equation was Christianity's increasing irrelevance in a changing world that began to look to science for answers to the mysteries of life and its complex problems. With the advent of Darwinism, that offered a completely natural explanation for the existence of life, Christianity was viewed as an outdated belief system conjured in the minds of primitive men.

Though the Bible offered the answers to rebut Charles Darwin's dubious theories, the Christian church failed to respond and Darwin's theory of evolution grew and metastasized like a deadly cancer throughout the world. In less than a century after Darwin published On the Origin of the Species in 1859, his theory of evolution was being taught as factual science in public, high school, college and university classrooms.

Millions of people were conditioned to believe that they were nothing more than the end product of random evolutionary forces. Life was now meaningless and a human life was considered no more significant than an ant or a worm. 

Darwin's theory had a logical, albeit unintended impact. It indirectly denied accountability to a Holy God and his transcendent moral laws. If life occurred naturally according to random, unintelligent forces, then there was no life beyond the physical realm and no judgment after death for one's behavior during his or her lifetime on earth. Under this worldview, crime, violence and moral decadence began to explode across the world.

Since the biblical worldview of man's fallen nature that predisposed him to sin was increasingly considered outdated, new theories were sought to explain man's behavior. And so, the Bible was replaced by the godless theories offered by humanistic psychology. 

Human behavior, that the Bible described as deceitful and beyond mortal understanding (Jeremiah 17:9) was now considered explainable by science. Men such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers arose to offer various theories that they believed could explain human behavior scientifically.

Jung offered his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Freud offered psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. Maslow offered his hierarchy of needs and Rogers offered his theory of human personality. 

All these theories and the myriad of theories that came after had a common denominator; they denied man's inherent sinful nature and its powerful influence upon human behavior. Jung's theory claimed that man was a prisoner of the so-called collective unconscious; that his behavior was motivated by repressed memories stored deep in the unconscious. Jung's theory led to hypnosis, an occult technique that was designed to retrieve repressed memories in order to uncover the roots of the emotional maladies that allegedly plagued people.

With the advent of humanistic psychology, people became victims instead of perpetrators. Behaviors such as alcoholism, gambling, greed, drug and sex addictions that were once considered willful, sinful acts were now considered "diseases." Therapy rather than repentance was now prescribed as the antidote for the results of bad moral choices. And the term "mental illness" was coined to explain aberrant behavior once attributed to sin.

Even the Christian church fell victim to this new form of intellectual witchcraft. Many Christian colleges and seminaries began to offer degree programs in "Christian Psychology" that attempted to combine the godless theories of Freud, Jung, Maslow, Rogers etc. with Jesus Christ. And ministries began to appear sporting a Christian facade that ignored sin while promoting positive-confession-possibility thinking as the new path to happiness and eternal life.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the apostle Paul warned that in the end times directly preceding the return of Jesus Christ, "men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths." (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

We have seen Paul's prophecy fulfilled with the advent of humanistic psychology. The Bible clearly says that the one and only path to happiness and eternal life is through Jesus Christ. Only when we are reunited with God by being born-again through faith in Jesus Christ can we truly be delivered of our sins as well as our emotional problems.

That can't happen any other way, and certainly not through psychology which is a flimsy foundation built upon sinking sand.