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| Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller |
Many Christians have come to believe that psychology is a good and necessary ministry within the modern church.
And many pastors and ministers often refer their troubled members to psychologists to help them overcome such problems as alcohol, drug, gambling and sex additions, depression, failing marriages, anger, resentment, faulty relationships etc.
And yet, until the arrival of secular, humanistic psychology in the 19th century, the Christian church relied quite successfully on the inspiration of Scripture to deal with the sort of problems that "Christian" psychologists are now being asked to solve.
First of all, what is psychology? It's a secular ideology that's falsely promoted as a science (Behavioral Science) that claims to study the human psyche or soul. Its goal is to solve the mysteries of human behavior by uncovering the sources and causes of that behavior.
But science can't explain human behavior any more than a computer can predict what the weather's going to be six months or two years from now.
For something to be defined as a science, it not only has to be observable, but it has to have a definitive cause and effect relationship.
No two human beings react the same way under the same circumstances. For example, when people are threatened with physical violence, some will stand their ground and defend themselves while others will run away.
That's not scientific--that's just how human beings react. Some are bold and some are meek. If human behavior was scientific, it would be predictable because all human beings would respond the same way to specific circumstances. But they don't all respond the same way.
That manifests in serial killers who grew up in homes with well-adjusted siblings. Brutal murderers such as John Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer had siblings who grew up to live normal lives.
That proves that bad parents and dysfunctional families don't necessarily produce violent children. If human behavior was scientifically predictable, then the siblings of Gacy and Dahmer should have turned out just like them. But they didn't.
Even the Bible states that human behavior is mysterious and unpredictable: "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9)
How and when did psychology enter the church? Psychology seems to have entered the church in the 1920s when a former Methodist minister named Norman Vincent Peale decided that the biblical gospel ruined the self esteem of people and gave them a poor self image.
According to Peale, the gospel's historic message that people were fallen sinners alienated from God and in need of redemption by faith in Jesus Christ, resulted in guilt feelings that caused them to hate themselves and do terrible things.
Peale reasoned that people didn't need redemption from sin, they needed to be redeemed from low self esteem. Thus, the false gospel of Positive, Possibility Thinking was born in Peale's Marble Collegiate Church in New York City.
Peale's rank heresies eventually metastasized like a deadly cancer throughout much of the Christian church. By the 1960s, an ardent disciple of Peale named Robert Schuller was drawing huge crowds to his church in Garden Grove, California.
Like Peale, Schuller rejected the biblical gospel and substituted it with his positive, possibility thinking gospel. That false gospel has become the foundation for Christian Psychology and its emphasis upon positive self-esteem-self love and inner healing.
How heretical was Peale who was one of the patriarchs of Christian Psychology? Many years ago, he said this on the Phil Donahue show: "It's not necessary to be born again. You have your way to God; I have mine. I found eternal peace in a Shinto shrine...God is everywhere."
In his second letter to fellow apostle Timothy, the apostle Paul recorded this prophecy: "For the time will come when 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)
Does that sound like those who reject the biblical gospel for Christian Psychology? It surely does. In Part Three: The biblical gospel versus the counterfeit psychological gospel.
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