Integration Symposium, February 15-16, 2007  

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Reviving Christian Psychology

Ellen T. Charry is the Margaret W. Harmon associate professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and immediate past Editor of the journal Theology Today. Her most recent books are Inquiring after God: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Blackwell), and By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine (Oxford). Recent essays include “Walking in the Truth: On Knowing God,”  “Grace and Sanctification in Anglican Theology” “Countering a Malforming Culture: Christian Theological Formation of Adolescents in North America,” and “The Uniqueness of Christ in Relation to the Jewish People: The Eternal Crusade,”and “Augustine of Hippo: The Father of Christian Psychology.” She serves as an editor-at-large for The Christian Century and has served on the editorial boards of Pro Ecclesia and The Scottish Journal of Theology. She is a member of the Theology Committee of the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church USA. She is currently working on retrieving the Christian doctrine of happiness.

Reviving Christian Psychology

Classical Christianity has an indigenous psychology because it is a way of life as much as a set of ideas. Christian psychology originates with Saint Augustine of Hippo as a result of his struggle to know, love, and enjoy God. Spiritual struggle becomes the paradigm of human maturation. Focus on character, personality, and temperament forges a bond among personal growth, ethics, and spirituality. Retrieving a Christian psychology inspired by Augustine will offer an alternative to the modern secular psychological paradigm.

Lecture 1: Psychological Theology

Summary

Theology and psychology are separated because each his forgotten its origin and task. Today there are serious points of tension between the two separated ‘disciplines’. This is artificial from the perspective of theology that has psychology embedded in it. Retrieving it for practical application will only be possible with the help of contemporary psychology and medically related fields.

Reading:

Ellen T. Charry. “Theology after Psychology” in Care for the Soul: Exploring the Intersection of Psychology and Theology, ed. Mark McMinn and Timothy Phillips, 118-33. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001.

Lecture 2: Understanding Saint Augustine’s Theological Psychology

Summary

To retrieve Christian psychology, we must begin at its source. St. Augustine of Hippo gave us a holistic theotherapeutic interpretation of the self. His psychology of the Christian self/soul integrates emotional and cognitive activities into a pilgrimage into the vision of God while recognizing temperamental and personality variables and the effects these have on cognition and understanding. He offers a construal of psychological development, as well as a theory of cognition and knowing.

Reading Augustine:

Confessions Books VII-X

De Trinitate Books VIII-XIV, especially Book XIII: 10-12

On Seeing God, City of God XXII: 29-30

Lecture 3: Recovering Augustinian Psychology

 Summary

Here we examine Augustine’s vision of psychological healing as the soul’s journey into God that is a straightening and redirecting of our loves. This also illustrates the difficulty of simply integrating theology and science, for the latter intends to be value-neutral while Augustinian psychology depends on drawing the patient or client into a mutually loving relationship with God.

Reading:

Augustine: Homilies on the First Epistle of John; Immortality of the Soul; The Catholic Way of Life.

Beyond:

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: New American Library, 1958, Lecture 8.