Psybibs: Psychological Biblical Criticism

Johann von Goethe observed that everybody wants to be somebody, but nobody wants to grow. That is not a universally applicable principle, fortunately, but it is what the therapist is often up against at the clinical level. That is, healing, education, maturation, and wholeness are each a growth process, and there is a profound sense in which illness, ignorance, immaturity, and counterproductive forms of spirituality are states or postures produced by obstruction of the needed growth. Likewise, wholeness, wisdom and knowledge, maturity and wholesomeness, are the final integrated achievements to which growth brings us.

The process of growth hinges upon insight. It requires the application of insight 1) to the state of our illness or need, and 2) to the possibilities and methods for growing or inciting growth. That principle is true, whether the obstruction to growth or resistance to the change is psychological, physiological, intellectual, theological, or a combination of these. I make that assertion against the backdrop of a Christian view of human personhood, structured in terms of the biblical theology of unconditional, radical, and universal grace.

That is, I am assuming that God has imputed an inviolable status to humans. That status of companion and compatriot of God means humans have a significant role and status in life. We are more than merely servants or children of God. It is a status and role of being, among other things, co-laborers with God in the development in this world of his reign of grace that works and love that heals. As persons, God created us in his image, we share his essential qualities and characteristics: communication, creativity, generativity, memory, self-conceptualization or self-consciousness, decisiveness, rationality, power, self-actualization, love, and the like. This assumption, moreover, includes the perception that God will not and cannot abrogate our status.

This biblical view of the Living Human Document implies that the nature of humans is shaped by an identifiable set of magnificent potentials for psychological, physical, intellectual, and spiritual growth. Such a biblical view further conceives the destiny of humans to be the achievement of wholeness and integration through total actualization of all the potentials inherent in humanness, namely, inherent in the status of God-compatriot and carrier of the divine image. Facilitating that is the task of the psychologist and pastor.

So, viewed psychologically and theologically, a complete understanding of human beings centers in a sense of the purpose of human existence, our destiny before God's face and in God's grace. That is, a biblical psychotheology of human nature conceives of us as being born for and moving toward a purposive destiny. That purpose is the achievement of wholeness and self-fulfillment or self-actualization through growth. That is not only true of humans but of the entire material universe. Thus, health is the state of having achieved wholeness or being in the process of achieving it and having gained that degree of it appropriate to one's stage of psychospiritual maturity at any given point in time.

Biblically oriented psychologists, theologians, and other clinicians, therefore, must develop clinical criteria for assessing the process of psychospiritual healing and wholeness, and of a person's stage in it. Secular psychology, insofar as it represents unimpeachable truth about its field, provides us with much ready-made equipment and insight for this endeavor. Those secular information resources must be received gratefully and seriously, as a gift from God's general revelation through the natural and social sciences. We can wisely employ them in a psychotheological framework.

The principles for wholeness and health stated above, apply equally to physiological, psychological, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual spheres. They are equally true with regard to sickness of body, mind, and spirit, and apply as much to treatment of clinical pathology as to spiritual dysfunction, sinfulness, and religious disorder. Biblically oriented therapists have a high motivation driving our concern for a dialogue between psychology and theology, in this quest to understand wholeness and the process of healing that leads to it. That motivation arises from the sense that there is a necessary, and not merely accidental, relationship between our being a reflection of God's nature, celebrating God's grace, and being a psychological scientist, therapist, or pastoral counselor.

There are difficulties inherent in this matter, one of which is the difficulty of basic definition. In his fine book, Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece, Bennett Simon declared that the difficulty in talking about psychology is that of getting a commonly agreed upon definition even among the specialists in psychology.1 It is important, therefore, that we further clarify our main concepts.

In general, the subconscious posture of persons in Western culture, professional healers and laypersons alike, is surprisingly negative and stereotyped with regard to those who are ill. We often unconsciously feel that those who are ill did not exercise enough, diet responsibly, eat well enough, protect themselves, buy enough supplements, live well, stay youthful, or choose good ancestors. We spontaneously assume that they are ill because God, fate, aging, destiny, or their irresponsibility or misbehavior has finally caught up with them. We must admit that the ill are seen as second-class citizens. They are exploited, objectified, warehoused, manipulated, and generally handled as objects. Something in us arrogantly infers, as did Job's four friends, that the ill are getting what is coming to them, though we may empathize or sympathize. We, of course, as Job's friends, are somehow superior, even morally superior, since we are not ill.

That psychotheology of illness will not square with our biblical understanding of the nature of human personhood and with the theology of divine and human grace. A sound psychotheology of illness must operate from the perspective that mentally or physically ill persons are, despite their deficits, God-compatriots of infinitely and inviolably worthy status, whose growth toward their divinely destined self-actualization, physically, psychologically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, has somehow been obstructed. That state of obstruction to and loss of growth is, by definition, illness. We infrequently think of their illness as a gift to them and that they may be growing from their pain.

The obstructive illness may be a genetic distortion, a foreign organism, an imbalance in nutrition, a malfunction of metabolism, a disrupted socialization, a failure of appropriate instruction and guidance, inappropriate fear, neurotic anxiety, ineffective worship, unchanneled assertiveness, bad biochemistry, or the like. Whatever is the case, insight on the part of the patient and understanding applied by the healer is necessary to free the patient for growth, health, and wholeness; even the health and wholeness that may come from the seasoning effects of pain and illness. Sickness has no moral import, but is simply an existential condition. The only moral issue is whether the healer and the patent promote healing if and where it is possible.

It is predictable, then, that a psychotheology of healing deals with the method and substance of reducing obstructions to growth and health, and enhancing growth's vitality. This is the immediate level of concern to the clinician and pastor. It is imperative that the clinician's model of humanness is comprehensively shaped by a dynamic biblical anthropology, that is, a concept of human nature structured in terms of a thoroughgoing theology of grace. Only then can his or her psychotheology of illness, healing, and health or wholeness be sound.

Moreover, the healer's biblical anthropology, as that of any biblically concerned scientist, must be dynamic, not static or limited and constrained by dogma, tradition, or political correctness, at the data management, research methodology, and theory development, and clinical operations or application levels. It must be interacting constantly with real clinical and pastoral experience, as well as with the work of the research scientists at the theoretical, research, and database levels, so that the healer's biblical view of human nature is constantly being reshaped and refined by the combined experience of all four levels of the quest. Only then will it progressively mature honestly and relevantly.

Siegler and Osmond provided interesting insights and useful foci for the field of clinical psychology. In their book, Models of Madness, Models of Medicine, they presented a table of eight current models of psychopathology.2 For each model they described twelve typical clinical functions, including diagnosis or definition, etiology, subject behavior, treatment, prognosis, therapy setting, types of therapists, rights of the patient and of the patient's social unit, and goals of therapy.

They described current models and the definitions of psychopathology characteristic of each. The medical model assumes a physician will diagnose the illness, rule out other pathologies, inform the patient, and determine treatment and prognosis. Natural causes are assumed to be the sources of the disorder. The goals of the process are to 1) prevent worsened illness, 2) cure the symptoms, 3) if possible eliminate the sources, 4) accumulate medical knowledge in the process, and 5) do no harm. The moral model assumes that a moral practitioner will determine the nature and extent of the dysfunction or inappropriate and hence immoral behavior. The specific etiology is assumed to be unimportant, but has to do with learned bad behavior of some kind. Treatment modifies the bad behavior with discipline: positive and negative sanctions. Prognosis is considered good if the patient cooperates in the establishment of behavior change instructions and reinforcement of good behavior. The goal of therapy is to alter the patient's behavior with acceptable social norms.

The impaired model sees the patient as maimed and is unconcerned with most of the twelve functions, except diagnosis and institutionalization. The goal is to protect the patient from society and vice versa. Anything short of permanent impairment is not identified as clinical pathology. The psychoanalytic model assumes patients are somewhere on a continuum from mild neurosis to severe psychosis. Diagnosis is not significant; etiology is very important; therapy involves decoding the patient's symbolic systems and creating a transference base, enhancing the patient's move toward health. The patient has the right to sympathy, empathy, and progress toward health. The goal is to resolve the pathogenic conflicts, whether intrapsychic or psychosocial in nature.

The social model assumes that society is sick and the patient's pathology is accidental to that. The sociopathology of the patient can be corrected by social change in the community. The rights and goals of society, the patient, and the therapist focus on creation of a healthy social environment for growth, especially for children. The psychedelic model sees psychopathology as a mind-expanding or distorting trip prompted by families or communities who drive patients crazy. Therapy involves breaking the family bond, providing a "guided trip" to enlightenment, and so allowing the patient to develop the inner potential to change the self and his or her world.

The conspiratorial model assumes that pathology is a label given to the patient by others who cannot tolerate deviance. Treatment is brainwashing for the purpose of maintaining the status quo. The family interactional model assumes that patients are the index of family pathology. The patient's symptoms are enactment of the family's pathology. Family therapy is required and, if effective, the family will give up its pathological game pattern and the index person can drop the personal symptoms. The goal of therapy is to understand the family dynamics and restore pathological families to functional relationships.

It is evident that each of these models expresses some aspect of the truth with which psychologists and pastors must deal. It is difficult to critique all of the Siegler-Osmond categories in detail, but a few observations may be useful. First, the social model, though it embodies some reality, has thoroughly dysfunctioned in our society, as indicated by the hopeless ineffectiveness of the costly strategies for basic social change attempted over the last half century, from the individual and local level to the federal government and society level. Modifying the person by modifying the social setting does not work. That is further evident from recent acknowledgment that the longstanding strategies of the judiciary for rehabilitation of criminals has not worked and is financially, scientifically, and culturally bankrupt.

The impaired, psychedelic, and conspiratorial models offer no comprehensive usefulness at all. The medical model and family interaction model are much more comprehensively applicable, but both are deficient in their assessment regarding the seriousness of the general patient's depth and degree of disorder. The psychoanalytic model comes closest to appreciating the radical extent and depth of human pathology and dysfunction, but like the medical and family models, it is in danger of failing to appreciate adequately the pathological state of human beings generally, the radical depth of our alienation from our real potentials and our destiny. It is at risk for failing, therefore, to appreciate the extent of generalized pathogenic anxiety and dissonance, intrapsychic and psychosocial, which lie at the root of human pathology and are inherent in the current state of just being a human being. The self-perceived fallenness or brokenness, alienation, and isolation at the core of our humanness is underestimated. The spiritual side of all this is to easily ignored as irrelevant or inaccessible.

There are eight principals or concepts which may be taken into consideration to insure that in the work of psychotherapy and pastoral counseling the whole person of the patient or parishioner is addressed, including spiritual facets. These have to do with the themes that need to be taken into consideration if the healer is to develop a role and style that incarnates divine grace into his or her person and work. These themes might be called biblical principles. They ring true to and illumine psychological theory and practice at numerous key points. That is, biblical anthropology or notions of human nature, illumines sound psychosocial research and practice. These principles have to do with the biblical notions of personhood, alienation, grace, sin or sickness, discipline, the woundedness of the healer as well as the patient, mortality, and celebration as a way of life.

The biblical theology of human personhood is profound. Its essence is the emphasis upon unconditional grace from God to humans and from us to each other. As humans we are unconditionally cherished by God in spite of ourselves. God so loved the world that he created its ingenious evolution and cherishes it, investing all of us with inviolable dignity and value. Our flaws and fracturedness, our sickness and inadequacy, have not prompted God to abrogate this commitment to us. In this nonnegotiable and inviolable status each person has only two options. We can place ourselves in a posture that rings true to that God-given status and, therefore, be true to our real selves; or we can choose to be inauthentic to that relationship with God, in perspective, disposition, or behavior, and suffer the dissonance and dis-ease inherent to such a posture.

Nonetheless, God remains preoccupied with human need not human naughtiness, with our failure of destiny more than of duty, and with our potential for healing not with our flawed past. Since God confirms needy or suffering persons and their healers in that quality of personhood and that state of grace, biblical psychological theory and practice must be based upon it. Patients and parishioners are free to be what they are for the sake of what they can become, before the face and in the grace of God.

The biblical theology of alienation starts, in the mythic faith system of most biblically concerned persons, with the story of the fall in Genesis 3. As noted there, while this ancient Mesopotamian myth, dressed up in the clothes of ancient Israel's God, is a symbolic report upon human birth and adolescent maturation, it nonetheless expresses a deep truth about each human person who feels like a child that has lost touch with his or her father's hand. Our state of fallenness or feelings of being out of joint with the universe is expressed well in Augustine's prayer, "You have made us for yourself and our souls are restless until they rest, O God, in you."

That we are people who fall short of our own inherent potential and our God-designed destiny, is obvious and requires no theological argument or persuasion. The psychological realities of that are evident every day, everywhere. The brokenness and disjointedness of the psyche of all humans is an empirical expression (1) of our unfulfilled human longing for our father's hand, (2) of the primal anxiety permeating everything, and (3) of the thirst for anxiety-reduction as a our main quest in life. The many psychospiritual compensatory strategies incited by all of that are frequently, in themselves, inducers of further illness. Religion, particularly Judeo-Christian religions of divine grace, are designed to be significant, indeed the ultimate, anxiety reducers. The uniqueness of the authentic biblical theology of grace is that it reveals God as unconditionally gracious and accepting of us as we are, rather than being a threat to us. Religion that does not center in this insight, even much of distorted Judaism and Christianity, moves instead in the direction of legalistic self-justification. It is the strategy of forcing God's favor by means of correct performance of liturgical or ethical requirements, thus measuring up to some kind of religious or social standards. This is always self-defeating because no one ever believes he or she has adequately measured up, unless he or she is a pathological narcissist.

In authentic biblical religion, grace as unconditional positive regard for the inadequate or sick human is the exclusive anxiety reducer. That is reinforced by the opportunity for the healed person to live a spontaneously joyful life of gratitude for that healing insight. Any one who really gets that point will spontaneously turn his or her life around and declare that if God feels like that about me, I want more than anything to be God's kind of person. So a proper biblical theology of human alienation or fallenness from our own ideal destiny is critically necessary to the biblical oriented healer's perception of self and others. Only this can generate the proper recognition of God's way of dealing with our brokenness as an analogue for how we handle our patients and parishioners.

The biblical theology of grace, therefore, is critical for shaping any sound psychological or psychotherapeutic concept or method. In the Bible, grace is unconditional, arbitrary, universal, exploitable, radical, and uncalculating. It is unconditional as in the parable of the Prodigal Son. It is universal as in the promises to Abraham in Genesis 12 and 17: a covenant for the healing of all nations; as well as in John 3:16-17 and numerous passages in Paul's letters. It is radical in that, by an arbitrary act of God, it cuts through to the center of human alienation, whether humans like it or not, as in Micah 7:18-20. Moreover, God's grace perpetually reaffirms the compatriot status of all of us humans with God, in spite of ourselves. Throughout history that has been a difficult perception for the believing community to hold to. It took the ancient Israelites about 1000 years to lose their grip on it and revert to the legalisms of the Priestly Code. It took the early Christians about 500 years to resort to the formalistic religion of scholasticism with its legalistic medieval atonement theories and ethics. It took the Protestants about 250 years after the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries to revert to a kind of medieval scholastic Reformed Theology.

We seem to be improving our pagan efficiency over time. Humans have a native compulsive proclivity to try to get our own hands on the controls of self-justification, because accepting free grace is so scary and so nearly unbelievable for people who are somewhat neurotic and perceive themselves as "not OK ", as well as for narcissists who are always sure they are the only ones who are thoroughly OK. All of us fall, to some degree, in one of those categories or the other. Moreover, accepting free grace requires accepting the need for it, and most of us do not recognize that our problem is as profound as it is. We do not believe that we are inherently alienated from our true selves, our true potential, our authentic destiny, and hence from wholeness.

The biblical theology of sin is likewise crucial to this model of biblically interested therapy. Contrary to popular opinion, sin is a failure in achievement of authenticity to self and of full-orbed personhood in God's grace. It is a distortion and distraction to lesser achievements. It cannot be compensated for. It can only be converted from. Metanoia is the only solution. That is a Greek word for changing one's mind, life direction, and posture toward God. That change from illness to health is possible only to the person who has heard the announcement that he or she is forgiven and accepted unconditionally. Nietzsche said that "the courage to be," in this hopelessly tragic world, is the ability to stand at the brink of the abyss of nothingness and hear without flinching the announcement that God is dead!

The real story that he could have known is that the courage to be, in this fractured and alienated world, is the ability to stand in the middle of the hopelessness and helplessness of human alienation and hear the announcement that God has embraced us in spite of ourselves. That is the courage to accept unconditionally God's unconditional acceptance of us: to realize that since God is for us no one and nothing can be against us! Ultimately, each person cannot even be against himself or herself as an obstruction to divine grace and acceptance, since, in the end, as St. Paul declares, every eye shall see God and every knee shall bow before God, and every tongue will affirm God, to the glory of God and the healing of humankind.

Such an outlook comes from hearing the word that human destiny is the destiny of realizing in full-orbed personhood the palpable experiences of the secure status of compatriot of God; a status God has imputed to us in spite of ourselves, as God's co-laborers in extending God's reign of forgiveness and love. God never abrogates that status. We cannot sin ourselves out of his grace, nor squirm out of his long embrace. He simply waits for us to achieve the self-actualization that expresses it. Our sin or sickness is merely a matter of falling short of that expectation.

God's law is not a threat in the sense that an infraction brings loss of favor. It is rather a constitution for the kingdom of peace and prosperity, of shalom, wholeness in every way. It is interesting that Jesus was oriented, as were the prophets, toward social and psychological wholeness, rather than merely toward private piety and personal purity. Religions of mere private piety and personal purity tend to be idolatry of the self, narcissistic, making of the self a kind of plastic doll to be cherished for its own sake. True biblical religion is a celebration of the compatriot status grace establishes for us who are made in God's image. What we have tended to call sin, incorrectly I think, is a distraction to trying to be OK by measuring up to some standard and obsessively pursuing purity. This is a different sort of psychological business than maturity in the freedom God's grace brings to us. Thus Martin Luther counseled us to , "Sin boldly." Since we are going to fall short, in any case, we are to step out boldly into the new day, living in the assurance of God's grace, preoccupied with God's grace, not with how we fall short of self-actualizing all our growth potentials.

The biblical theology of discipline is the theme of discipleship. Getting well and doing good is enacting grace. Discipline is the endeavor of beginning down the road of forgiving ourselves and others, of acceptance of ourselves and others, of unconditionally cherishing ourselves and others, and of reflecting in this way the nature of the divine analogue of delight in us as we are. The discipline of discipleship is a troth with self and with God to incarnate in ourselves God's divine grace-dynamic that infuses the universe. It is the troth "to forsake all other preoccupations and keep ourselves only to that divinely ordered destiny."

Jesus urged people to such discipline by the grace with which he handled them. The adulterous woman (John 8) brought to him for judgment he urged, "I do not condemn you. Go your way and do not hurt yourself anymore. It is untrue to your self." To the Samaritan woman (John 4) he gave the insight that spirituality, not religiosity, is the issue at the center of our psychological and spiritual health. Peter, the denier, Jesus ordained. Matthew reports that when Judas met Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane to betray him to the authorities, Jesus embraced him, held on to him, and said, "Friend, how did it come to this?" The discipline of discipleship means to be bound to God and so to be free in his grace. It means to live toward what life can and will be. Since that is what life is designed to be, godly expectations for healers and their clients will be shaped by such a transcendent psychospiritual worldview.

Henri Nouwen has the finest word on the biblical theological theme of the wounded healer.3 He takes the suffering servant notion of the Hebrew Bible, which is also epitomized in the messianic theology of the New Testament, and he points out metaphorically that there are five doors for God, and for the human healer into the heart of human need. There is the door of the woundedness of the world, the woundedness of any given generation, the woundedness of each individual, the wounds of Jesus Christ, and the woundedness of the human healer. By woundedness he means the fracturedness, inadequacy, distortion, dysfunction, and illness of a person: the way and degree in which we all fall short of our potential as God made us to be. Nouwen refers to all the ways in which we fall short of our own realistic ideals and goals.

Nouwen points out that this wounded healer theme implies that all grace, growth, and healing are communicated or incited by starting where the healer and the person to be healed are in the human journey. The humanness and brokenness of both must be affirmed. The healer's role is not to remove the pain of life from the sufferer but to interpret it. Moreover, the evidence in the healer of woundedness and pain, and of the transcendence or constructive endurance of it, helps to heal the patient. Carl Jung felt that half of the healing power of any healer lay in the notion of the archetype healer projected by the patient upon the therapist.4 Therefore, the value of the healer sharing his or her own growth dynamics in therapy is relevant here. The wounded healer can become the model and the incarnation of the risk taking inherent to growth, healing, and wholeness, necessary for the patient or parishioner.

The biblical theological theme of mortality is directly related to the idea of the wounded healer. The Bible gives little impetus to the perfectionist notion that building God's reign of grace and love in this world will eliminate mortality and the brokenness of this world. Instead it affirms our mortality, and the world's fracturedness, and the terminal nature of life. The Bible emphasizes the strategies for making godly sense of things in that setting. That, after all, is what grace is all about. The brokenness, humanness, and sickness of the world is affirmed - as well as the fact that we are dying men and women in a generation of dying men and women. It acknowledges both the malignancy and the magnificence in the universe.

The persistent malignancy is pathologically denied in our cultural idealization of the bigger and better. The Bible says it is ok to vary from the idealized norm. It is acceptable to age, wrinkle, decrease, distort, weaken, become more dependent, and even die. In fact, to die can be a real gain, in the end, according to St. Paul. Youthfulness is not the focus of meaning in the biblical concept of mortality. Maturation is! Patients need to feel in therapists the biblical realization that it is a supportable, and perhaps even a celebratable, condition to be a human, mortal, dying person, before the face of God.

The finest biblical illumination of what it means behaviorally to be biblical or godly in our work and world is the biblical theological theme of celebration. It is a revealing clinical and biblical fact that people who can be grateful can be healthy and people who are incapable of generating spontaneous and authentic gratitude are unable to be psychospiritually healthy. They do not have the interior machinery or dynamics for it. The German Reformers knew that four hundred and fifty years ago when they wrote it into the warm, humane document of the Heidelberg Catechism, with its focus upon gratitude as the godly way of life.

They said we must know three things for a life of wholeness: the size of our need, the nature of our healing, and the life of gratitude appropriate to that healing. Celebration as gratitude may take the form of worship, or the posture before our divine father that we call prayer, or just the satisfied joy of living. Celebration may be exhilarated joy for the providence of God in life, or for a specific deliverance from a specific suffering or dysfunction. To be godly means to be celebrating our father's beneficence. A biblical therapist or pastor who sees life as that kind of enterprise will incarnate for the patient crucial elements of celebration in the clinical spirit and process that he or she provides during illness, healing, and the achievement of wholeness.

So it should be clear that a biblical or godly psychotheological model of pathology and healing interventions is essential. It must incorporate an adequate appreciation of our real sense of universal dysfunction and lostness, expressive of the distance between our destiny and our daily function, between our potentials and our problematic state of underachievement and under-evolvement, between our imagination and our performance, between our reach and our grasp. It must take into consideration the physical stress and distress, the sickening effects, and the psychospiritual defeat reflected in and generated by that distance between God's realities for us evident in the strengths of our own nature and our other realities of the flawed factors in us.

We are all rational, emotional, relational, and biological persons. To be whole we need to function with coherent thought, freely expressed emotions, mutually gratifying and empowering relationships, and medically sound bodies. These are the basic concerns of the healer. To develop a godly healing strategy that adequately reflects a biblical view of human nature and a thoroughgoing grace theology will involve ten essential factors. First, the healer must incarnate in his or her person unconditional acceptance of the needy person, accepting him or her just where he or she is in life's journey, no matter how sick or well. Second, the healer must evince the kind of empathy that places him or her inside the psychospiritual frame of reference of the patient's or parishioner's pathology.

This will greatly assist the healer in the endeavor to determine the sources and nature of the obstructions to health, as well as the possibilities for growth and healing, inherent in the suffering person. In this set, the healer can affirm the sufferer as a person, not just as a patient, as God affirms all of us in our psychospiritual dysfunction. God takes our dysfunction or illness seriously and reinitiates growth by means of it. Verbal and non-verbal mediation of God's unconditional acceptance of persons, sick and well, is a crucial baseline for the needy person's recovery of a sense of self-worth and power; and a worthwhile destiny that rings true to his or her real nature and potentials as a whole person.

Third, the godly healer will provide the suffering person a sense of mutuality with the healer in the quest for wholeness upon which the patient-therapist team has embarked. Fourth, it will be evident in the therapy process that the healer, too, is wrestling with his or her own humanness, in its pathology and its potential for health. Fifth, within this sound strategy it will become evident that the psychologist's or pastor's worldview includes a real ambition for the wholeness of all humans and that this particularly needy person is embraced within that larger concern. Sixth, the possibilities and expectations for the patient or parishioner inherent in that worldview will become overtly apparent. Seventh, the grace-imputed status of the suffering person as a co-laborer or compatriot with God in the healing of himself or herself and in the healing of the whole world of humankind will be seen by the patient or parishioner as the underpinning of his or her real life and world.

Eighth, soundly established techniques for countering defensive patterns in the patient or parishioner will be used to defeat obstructions of growth to wholeness. Ninth, the needy person's physical, intellectual, psychological, and spiritual needs and states will be taken seriously as functions of a whole-person-concern for wholeness and wholesomeness. Tenth, the effectiveness of this healing intervention will be measured in relative terms at each level of increased functionality - physical, psychological, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual - in the light of the expectation that the ultimate achievement of health will be the arrival at psychospiritual maturity. This entire process assumes, of course, that the healing by both psychologist and pastor is grounded in an assiduous commitment to sound scientific criteria of diagnosis and clinical intervention.

The consequences of the above for psychotherapy are eight obvious operational results. To operate clinically from the point of view that humans image the nature of God and are given by God an inviolable status and role as God's co-workers in the kingdom of grace and love, first of all, leads the healer first to communicate to the suffering person how much the healer appreciates the sufferer's infinite worth, dignity, and esteem as God's person. It is necessary for needy persons to realize that, in spite of themselves and their dysfunction, they have this pre-established identity that cannot be taken away from them and that sets the course for their growth to wholeness. The point of therapy is to recover and enhance that sense of identity. Though it may never be overtly explained in therapy, it will shape the healer's affirmation of the needy person and hence that person's experience of being affirmed by the healer. This unconditional positive regard for the patient is equally the imperative of good scientific psychotherapy and of a sound biblical theology of grace.

This perspective, taken from the biblical themes we discussed above, secondly, implies for the suffering person a certified and secure destiny, infused with a clear sense of purposeful psychospiritual self-realization. Thirdly, this can insure for the needy person the certainty of receiving the kind of acceptance in society, that is the analogy derived from the analogue of God's unconditional grace and acceptance of all of us. Administered with responsible psychotherapeutic interventions, this will defuse neurotic guilt, unproductive remorse, hopelessness, unresolved grief, self-pity, compulsivity, fear, guilt, and shame, as well as some of the need for schizoid ideation. That biblical perspective also potentially decreases the need for the defeating processes of masked denial, self-justification, self-affliction, and the conversion-reactions so often produced by these. Moreover, the insight afforded by these biblical themes frees one for informed and constructive self-acceptance.

Fourthly, it can provide the patient or parishioner the foundation for a life-style of dignity, of being cherished and affirmed, rather than of self-abnegation and demeanment. Such a sense of self will be reinforced by the corollary insight that the dysfunction of the sufferer is a failure of destiny and not of duty: illness is not a moral issue! Moreover, fifthly, this biblical outlook on things can take the anxiety out of the therapy process for the psychotherapist and the pastoral counselor. Since God is God and grace is grace, even when we are not experiencing it, the therapist need not feel as though the weight of the world is on him or her, and as though the therapist's own personhood or destiny hangs on the outcome of "this case." As a result, the therapist's anxiety will be reduced and the dysfunction of the therapist with which the patient must deal will be decreased.

That frees the healer to make the God-like decisions often necessary in the healing process. This clinical model should effect meaningful, constructive anxiety reduction for the suffering person who perceives that he or she does not need to get well in order to be accepted and cherished, certified and honored, by the healer or by God. Thus the patient is free to get well in a naturally unfolding unpanicked growth process. The patient will be led to recognize that his or her worthiness is inherent, not earned by measuring up to the therapist's expectations, his or her own expectations, or God's.

Such a process, furthermore, provides a setting of trust, healthy transference, and increased potential for the risk-taking necessary to growth; as well as reduced injection of the therapist's pathology into the growth framework of the patient. The suffering person can know from the experience with the therapist that he or she is affirmed and certified as a worthy person who may, therefore, develop a sense of worth and worthiness that is inherent to him or her, as person, rather than earned by approvable behavior or by getting well.

Seventh, to work out of such a perspective makes it possible for the healer and the person in need of healing to be usefully humorous about themselves, each other, their pathologies, and their potentials. It makes possible also a good sense of humor about God, and about our limited ability to figure God out in relation to us or God's world. We can laugh about our presumption of knowing a lot more about God than we do. Finally, the relief from constraints that distract patients from psycho-spiritual self-actualization and self-esteem, afforded by this outlook, empowers the sufferer to a sense of freedom he or she never knew before or never believed was possible. This freedom makes possible our acceptance of our moral limitations and our inevitable mortality, the freedom to die well, for when we fall off the edge "of this mortal coil," we fall into the hands of the God of grace. That relief attacks the ultimate panic that stands as a specter behind all our pathology.

Theology and faith are cognitive-emotive processes. Therefore, their function for ill or good is intensely relevant and applicable to disorders that are cognitive or emotive in source. That means that healthy dynamics and perspectives in theology and faith will affect the potential health of the psychologist and pastor as well as their patients and parishioners who suffer such psychosocial disorders. Religious or spiritual dynamics may be somewhat less relevant in psychopathology that has bio-chemistry sources, though even there, a genuine biblical theology of grace may be invaluable in management of the symptoms.

Moreover, with the increasing evidence for the two-way switching function of the hypothalamus in channeling or controlling the impact of endocrine disorders upon the psychological field and psychic disorders on the endocrine function, the role of healthy or pathological spirituality and grace theology becomes increasingly interesting with regard to their role in or impact upon even those psychopathologies that appear to root in distortions of body chemistry. Therefore, concerns about theological perspective, faith commitment, religious experience, and spiritual maturity are becoming increasingly vital therapeutic issues. The concern to be a godly or biblically oriented professional in the Helping Professions really is a crucial one.

For me, the godly enterprise of a biblical perspective on healing people holds out one additional and overriding dimension: the incomparable encouragement and delight that, though I may never see a given patient again, in their need and quandary, I shall with certainty celebrate with them and all the saints of God our mutual ecstasy of gratitude one great and glorious morning when faith has become sight, when we shall see reality whole and face-to-face, and know and affirm God as thoroughly as God now knows and affirms us.

1 Bennett Simon (1980), Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece, The Classical Roots of Modern Psychiatry, Ithaca: Cornell.

2 Miriam Siegler and Humphrey Osmond (1974), Models of Madness and Models of Medicine, NY: Macmillan.

3 Henri Nouwen (1972), The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society, Garden City: Doubleday.

4 Carl G. Jung (1958), Undiscovered Self, R. F. C. Hull, tr., Boston: Little, Brown.