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Discipleship in Community:

Transcript - SF501 Discipleship in Community: © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 11 of 24SF501

Contemporary Factors: Psycho-Culture – Part I

Discipleship in Community:

In the previous 10 sessions, we’ve been basically constructing a biblical theology of the corporate dimensions of spirituality. Looking at the fact that spiritual formation involves the body of Christ together, that it is a mutual, reciprocal process that has as its goal the growth and development of the entire body, and not just the growth and development of individuals. Individuals are important as means, and we must be all that we can be in Christ individually. But that’s not the end. The end is the corporate growth of the body together. As we developed that biblical theology, as we developed that picture, that new paradigm for looking at spirituality, spiritual growth, maturity, development, spiritual formation, hopefully we’ve come to the idea, implicitly at least, that that’s not the situation as it exists today in the church that our approach to spirituality in this day and age is far more individualistic than it is corporate—that when we talk about the corporate dimensions of spirituality, we do not talk about them as a goal but rather as a means that the church and the other corporate aspects of Christian life exist for our individual benefit. We define the goal individualistically rather than corporately.

Well, obviously the situation as it exists in the church today is not consistent with that of the New Testament pattern and model that we’ve been building. In order for us to begin to affect change, we need to understand the factors that have contributed to the situation as it exists today. We need to understand those factors that have contributed to the biases, the predispositions, the presuppositions, the assumptions that people bring into the whole process of spiritual formation, these biases, and predispositions and presuppositions that all tend towards individualistic approaches to spirituality that all tend to divert us from the corporate picture that’s in the New Testament. They tend also to cause us to read into the New Testament the individualistic model rather than the corporate model that I believe is there.

John R. Lillis, Ph.D.Experience: Dean and Executive Officer

at Bethel Seminary in San Diego, CA.



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So the next major section of this course will focus on those factors that have led to what we now practice, have led to the individualistic thinking that is so prevalent within the church of the 20th century. What we want to do is to look first of all at the cultural factors, those factors outside the church that have contributed to a very individualistic approach to spirituality today. And we’re going to focus primarily on contemporary cultural factors and how those have developed within the last century. Then a little later, we want to look at those factors that have been within the church, theological developments over the 2,000 years of church history that have led to the individualistic approach. And there we’re going to primarily focus on the role and contribution of classical mysticism to the development of theology of spirituality.

Well, we want to begin looking at the cultural factors in this session. And here primarily we’re going to focus on the rise of something that Susanne Johnson in her book Christian Spiritual Formation in the Church and Classroom has called the “psycho-culture.” Psychology has become one of the primary sources to which modern Americans and modern people in the Western world in general go in their quest for self-meaning and self-fulfillment. Now this is occurring as you’re probably well aware of both inside and outside the church. Psychology has become the chief contender with the biblical tradition, the Judeo-Christian tradition, in furnishing metaphors for discussing and delineating Christian spirituality. Now let me qualify here at the beginning as I will several times throughout that I am not attacking psychology “in toto.” I am not saying that psychology, counseling has no place in the Christian life, that there’s no place for Christian counselors, Christian psychiatrists, and Christian psychology. That is not my intent at all. What I’m trying to point out here are some cultural factors, what our society has become, and the role that psychology has come to play in our society. Now as we look at the development of this psycho-culture, as we look at the development of this role, we need to realize that there are five distinctive schools of psychology that have greatly influenced the contemporary American context, the contemporary scene.

These five schools are first of all, traditional behaviorism of the form of B.F. Skinner, and I’m sure you’re familiar with that. This has been a separate strand, a separate school of influence that has helped to shape the scene as we see it today. Secondly has been classical psychoanalytical thought derived from Freud and his ideas and coming up through the 20th century. Thirdly has been what



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we call humanistic or third-force psychology and this beginning with Maslow and Rogers and others, the self-actualization types of thinking. Fourthly has been the transpersonal or fourth-force psychology men like Wilber and others focusing on the altered states of consciousness and the impact that this could have, biofeedback so on and so forth. You’re familiar with that, and then fifthly structural developmental theory with such men as Piaget, Kohlberg and other.

Taken together, these various schools of psychology have come to form a basic fund of meanings and metaphors that we may refer to, that Susanne Johnson refers to as a “psycho-culture.” Now what we’re talking about is that through these schools and the influence that they have had in society, we have basically developed a worldview that is characterized, that finds its metaphors to give meaning to life from psychology that when we want to describe the reality that is around us, we describe it often in terms of psychological vocabulary, in terms that have been derived from these schools of psychology, from psychology in general. So that these psychologies have begun to operate as I’ve indicated as an overall worldview in Western society, they give a model of how things ultimately are and a model for how we are to order our lives accordingly. They provide a normative perspective by which we see and orient ourselves within the world, a normative perspective that says the way things ought to be. They also give prescriptive interpretations of who we are to become as mature adults and how we are to negotiate that maturity. What we need to realize is that psychology has evolved beyond its role as a basic science and has become a mythmaker in our society, a mythmaker in the sense of providing the metaphor and meaning by which we explain reality, by which we make sense of the world about us, a model that provides a normative perspective of how things ought to be, a model that provides prescriptive interpretation of what we are to become and how we can negotiate that.

Cultural values that have arisen over the past 50 years resulting from this psycho-culture, this psychological worldview, make it difficult for believers to develop a distinctly biblical theology and understanding of Christian spirituality. Now again, let me qualify what I’m saying here. I am not saying that modern psychology as a science has nothing to contribute to a proper sense of self-understanding. As strictly scientific tools, these psychologies have much to offer Christian theology and Christian education. They provide other contexts for us as we develop our understanding, as we develop our ideas about whom and what man is. They provide



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valuable insight to us. Psychology, together with theology, can provide a more holistic picture of what we are and what it all means. Within our culture, however, as I’ve indicated, psychology has gone beyond functioning only as a science that investigates empirical data. It has taken over the role of spiritual and moral guidance in our society. When people have difficulties, when people have problems they no longer go to a pastor. They no longer go to friends. They no longer go to family. They have therapy. They go to a counselor, they go to a psychologist. And I think this is due in large part to the collapse of the church’s practice of providing spiritual direction within society as salt and light. The church is in full-scale retreat. We no longer believe that we have a message that is relevant for these types of situation. We no longer believe in the dynamics that community can play, the healthy dynamic that community can play as we have these interpersonal and relational matrices that should make up the local church, that should make up the family of God.

As modern man attempts to answer basic questions about who he should be and what he should do with his life, he’s being more and more shaped by the psycho-culture, by the worldview that derives its metaphors and meanings from psychology and from those five basic schools of psychology that have developed in this last century. More from those than he is from the Judeo-Christian ethic, from the biblical perspective, from a Christian worldview. And these very same people are the ones who respond to the gospel in faith, belief, and who come into the church and who bring that worldview in with them that those metaphors, those meanings that have become a part of the warp and woof of our society and our culture.

As we look at this psycho-culture, for the purpose of analysis, there are some basic areas that we can talk about and that we will talk about to better understand how they have played a role in shaping who and what we are today. Susanne Johnson again provides us a useful scheme of talking of these as she talks about the four trends or trajectories of the psycho-culture. And so we’ll base our discussion concerning this area upon these areas, these four basic trajectories. We’ll talk about ethical egoism, psychotherapy, individualism, and then what she calls feminist ideology. These concepts, these trajectories, these strands, these trends “represent a triumph” according to Johnson, “of the psycho-cultural values over corresponding Christian values that were more prevalent in Western civilization earlier. They represent synchronistic influences which are already permeating



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the church and its theology of spiritual formation at all levels.”

Well, let’s look then at the triumph of ethical egoism. Here we’re dealing with the theories associated with the more humanistic psychologies. These ideas, these theories center around growth and change, the ideas of growth and change necessary for proper human development. This is built on the model of self-actualization going back to Rogers and Maslow and the whole idea of realizing our full potential, realizing our self and all that we can be. Now implicit within the various self-actualization theories is the Greek notion of eudaimonism. Eudaimonism is the actually ancient Greek idea that there is an inner true self for every individual towards which everyone is correctable. Now this real inner self is not necessarily the existing empirical self, that outward external self that is presently observed by the watching world. That’s you in process. The real self is something internal. It’s your potential. It’s the ideal that you can be. So we often see in classical and even contemporary spiritual literature an expression of this in terms of the imperative “know thyself.” What is being said here, especially as it’s consistent with the ancient Greek idea of eudaimonism, is you are to know the inner self, know the real you, the potential that is there for you to be. And the idea again is that through a great deal of effort, one may eventually become the ideal self. Indeed, one has a responsibility to become that ideal self.

Now what has happened in contemporary society as this idea has worked itself through the third, fourth self-actualization psychologies and become a part of the basic metaphors and meanings of our cultural worldview today is that it is translated into a “duty to self “ethic. Not only should you become all that you can be but there is a moral imperative for you to discover and to develop your inner self, hence the name, the title ethical egoism. It is not only good, but a moral obligation for you to realize your full potential and hence, a sin for you not to realize that potential. It’s a sin for you not to be all that you can be. And often as this is expressed in the modern psycho-culture through the worldview that characterizes our society today, we hear that it is a moral obligation and a sin not to realize mental health. You have a moral obligation to be mentally healthy. There is a moral obligation for you to know yourself, to develop self-knowledge. There is a moral obligation, an ethical responsibility for you to develop your creativity, your spontaneity. There is a moral obligation for you to have high self-esteem. You owe it to yourself ethically, morally to be able to share your gut level feelings. You should have an



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allegiance to your felt needs. You have a right, indeed a moral obligation for personal happiness, individual freedom, indeed individual freedom, the freedom to do the things that you must do in order to have full self-actualization, to realize your full potential. These are all part or expressions of ethical egoism as it has become manifest in our society today. And I’m not saying by implication that these are all evil or bad or wrong. I’m using it merely in a descriptive sense. This is what our society says we have the right, indeed the moral obligation, to realize in our own lives.

I think we’ve seen several examples of this value in public places and in the press and so forth in recent years. I recall back in the Persian Gulf War there was an attempt by some of the airlines in our country to have searches of people who were Arab-looking without cause. And Pan Am and some other airlines, I think, were trying this. And various organizations took them to court on this, and they took them to court because the search denied personal, individual freedom. Now the airlines’ idea was that the Iraqi government was threatening to launch a worldwide terrorist campaign against the United States, and terrorism before that had often been characterized by bombs in airliners. And when you have a 747 with several hundred people on board, the airlines were thinking that we owe it to the rest of the passengers to have these searches. This is a war situation. Well, it failed in court. The suits against the airlines were successful so that the airlines were not able to do this. Now you’ve got to understand the (?)value that is going on here . The argument that was put forth and that was accepted was that individual freedom had priority over the safety and security of the larger number. Now that struck me in particular because when we were involved in missions, we flew across the Pacific several times. And when you’re at 30,000 feet in an airplane with three or 400 other people, sometimes you think about those things. What would happen if a bomb were to go off, that’s a long way down. And I was struck particularly by that decision and how it expressed in our society this ethical egoism, the right of an individual now took precedence over the security of a larger number of people, several hundred people.

I saw it illustrated also a few years back when having returned from Southeast Asia for a year’s furlough, my wife and I arranged to meet with some friends that we had gone to seminary with. And my friend had been in the pastorate and his wife, during that time, had had some emotional problems and had started by seeing a Christian counselor. Well, she didn’t like what the Christian



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counselor was telling her, so she eventually progressed to a non-Christian psychologist. And she had been under this individual’s care for some time. And by the time we had had lunch with them, she was saying things to the effect that what was really important was for her to realize her potential, that being my friend’s wife and being involved in his ministry had kept her from realizing her full potential. So now the therapist and she together had insisted that he leave the pastorate. And he was working in some other job right now while she was going to nursing school because she had always wanted to be a nurse. And what she told us was that when she finished with nursing school, she would decide at that point whether she wanted to remain in this marriage or not. Because after all, he and the kids were also stifling her in her desire to realize her full potential. They were keeping her from being everything that she could be, and she had an obligation, a right, an ethical obligation, to be all that she could be. Now she didn’t say that explicitly, but that was certainly expressed in the words that she was saying, that what was coming across was an articulation, an example, an illustration of this ethical egoism that underlies our society. First and foremost is my right to be all that I can be.

Think back what you know of the history of the country back in World War II when the armed services were recruiting for soldiers to go to war, the motive for joining up was to serve your country, to do your duty as a citizen of a democracy, to do your part in protecting freedom worldwide. Now as you look at television ads, what’s the motive for joining the army? The motive for joining the army is that you “be all that you can be.” The military has keyed right in on this basic aspect of today’s society, our cultural worldview, our way of looking at things, the metaphors and meanings that we have derived from this psycho-culture. Join the army so that you can be all that you can be. Why do you go to fast-food restaurants? Because you deserve a break today, you owe it to yourself. All of this is a part of the ethical egoism. Now we need to be aware that in this self-actualization theory, a logical fallacy has been committed. It’s the naturalistic fallacy. What we are doing is translating what is noticed as a natural human tendency in many human beings into an ethical norm for all human beings. Yes, we desire to be all that we can be. That doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it an ethical norm. Nonetheless, that’s what’s happened through the rise of this ethical egoism and the psycho-culture of today.



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Now at first glance, self-actualization psychology seems somewhat consistent with our traditional ideas of sanctification and transformation. Be all that you can be in Christ. Realize your full potential in Christ. In fact, I think it’s a significant part of much of contemporary evangelicalism’s views of spirituality. It’s reflected in the books dealing with spiritual formation. It’s not as blatant, but it’s there nonetheless that we need to develop our individual spirituality. And what is implicit within ethical egoism as it comes across into Christian spiritual formation is that the goal, the necessary goal of spiritual formation, spirituality, discipleship, is your individual relationship to God. Everything else exists so that you can be all that you can be in Jesus Christ.

We need to realize that there are dangers facing a biblical concept of spiritual formation which have resulted from the influence of this particular perspective. Now when I’m teaching this course in a residence class, when I have students in a classroom, I like to ask the students to define what Paul meant by die to self and why we’re to do it. And you could take a few moments right now and just jot down a definition. What does it mean to you to die to self? And why are you to die to self? Perhaps you could turn the tape recorder off and write that down. As I have done that exercise in the past with students, often I get answers that relate to an individual, spiritual self-actualization. People say what it means to die to self is to deny the fleshly desires, to deny myself things in order that I might become more spiritual, in order that my relationship to God be deeper and better. Well, often in those definitions in which we focus pretty much on our own spiritual development, we’re still very much alive to self. In fact we’ve not died to self. We’ve just shifted the emphasis from a “fleshly” to a “spiritual” emphasis. But the idea is still us. I want to be all that I can be in this new endeavor, in this thing called Christianity.

I saw an example of this in a seminar I attended once in which a theologian, a bit more liberal theologian perhaps than I am in my evangelical theology, but he was talking about John Wesley. And he was bemoaning the fact that Wesley never realized his full potential because of an overly-strict mother. Now what he was talking about were the times that John Wesley in his writings would attribute his development, his spirituality to the godly and pious influence of his mother. And he would talk about the positive aspects as he saw them in his spiritual life in terms of the influence that his mother had placed upon him in teaching him to live in a manner consistent with the Word of God. And this particular speaker was saying that Wesley could have been



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far more had he not been under the influence of this overly-strict mother, that in fact Wesley didn’t realize his full individual potential because of the restriction placed upon him.

Well, might we not also say that the Christian in his or her relationship to God also has restrictions and limitations that we live within the confines of the parameters of the Word of God and that individual development is contingent upon that? You see, often Christians’ way of looking at the value of any aspect of their Christian life is done in terms of their spiritual self-actualization. How is this going to help me realize my potential? Often church is looked at in that way. And either the selection of a church or remaining at a particular church is thought of in terms of spiritual self-actualization. People will say things like I’m not getting anything out of this. Therefore, I’m going to leave this church. Or I’m not growing, so I’m going to leave this church. I’m not realizing my full potential in Christ. Now as we’ve seen, as we’ve developed the biblical model, that’s not consistent with the biblical model. The key criteria for selecting a church, for becoming a part of the church is can I contribute to this church? What can I do? Are my gifts needed here? Is this where God would have me to minister? Do these people need me? And the same thing has to do with staying at a church. We don’t evaluate the church unless we’re talking about extremes where the church is contributing absolutely nothing. But we need to be careful of evaluating continuing at a church based upon our own existential evaluation of spiritual growth and feeding. Remember God has us in the church more for what we can do for it rather than what it can do for us. Remember the paraphrase that we talked about earlier, paraphrase of John Kennedy’s statement. Ask not what the church can do for you. Rather ask what you can do for the church.

Often Christians will express this ethical egoism in terms of their own spiritual development. We will hear things like that: people need to be more involved with their own personal development than they do in their local church. I can remember when I first returned from the field in 1990, and I was attending my local church and sitting in a Sunday school class. And someone raised their hand to dispute a particular point that had just been made and said that the problem that we had at our church is that too many people were busy doing and not being. Now I understand a proper and appropriate expression of that intent, of that thought, that we do need to focus on who we are, on being. But this particular individual went on to say that really we are all spending too much time here at the church and with people at the church. We all



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need to spend more time at home in prayer and Bible study and developing our personal relationship with Christ Jesus. Now this particular individual was really not doing anything in the church. And as they went on, basically what they were saying is that we only needed to come together once or twice a week to hear the Word taught in order that that could contribute again to our own personal development. And then we needed to go and spend the rest of the time that we normally spent in ministry to one another in our individual prayer closets reading and praying. That’s not what we have seen as we have been developing the biblical model of spirituality and spiritual formation.

As we have looked at the corporate dimensions, the end and I’ve said this many times and I’ll say it many more times: the end is not our individual self-actualization. That’s not the basic goal. The basic goal, the basic thrust, the end of spiritual formation is the growth of the body together. And the process itself demands that we are involved in interpersonal and relational context over and over again ministering to one another. Now the individual development certainly is important, and I’m not denying the importance and significance of personal devotional time, of private and quiet time together with the Lord. And probably most of us do not spend the degree of time that we need to, to become what we should be. But we need to realize that becoming what we should be in Christ, realizing our spiritual potential is not an end. It’s a means. It’s the means by which we develop the gifts that God has given us that we might more effectively and more fully and completely serve the church of Jesus Christ that the church might become more, that the church might grow, and that the church might realize its full potential. We need to be aware that many of the things we have identified as so crucial and critical and as being the goal of the spiritual life are merely a means to make us better instruments.

Now I need to again make some qualifying statements. Many of those things that I have identified as spiritual self-actualization are indeed important and biblical. For example, earlier when we talked about ethical egoism in terms of some of the factors that make that up, mental health, self-knowledge, creativity, spontaneity, high self-esteem, so on and so forth. Those are important. God does want us to be healthy mentally. We are to know ourselves. Creativity, spontaneity indeed are important parts of the Christian life. We’re not to think of ourselves as worms. There is an appropriate biblical self-esteem. We are image-bearers. We are created in the image of God and, therefore, we have worth. We



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have value because of that. And so there is a legitimate biblical self-esteem. However, we need to realize that all of those need to be set in a larger theological frame of reference. For example, the chief end of man, what is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to glorify God. The purpose of the church is to grow together.

The purpose of spiritual gifts, so that as we talk about mental health, as we talk about these different factors that we’ve associated with ethical egoism and the worldview of the psycho-culture, we need to realize that they should be defined. They should be thought of in a larger context, and we typically don’t do that. We typically don’t think of that larger context. We don’t think of that interpersonal and relational matrix that we belong to, the family of God, the people of God, and the church of Jesus Christ. We typically think of each of those factors in terms of our own individual growth and in terms of an end all be all that begins and focuses on us, us individually. And so much counseling and much discipleship, much of the practice of the Christian life in general is basically spiritual self-actualization for the good of the individual. We need to move away from that. We need to realize that the exercise of the spiritual gifts, the exercise of spiritual disciplines and we’ll talk a bit more about those in a later section of the course. All of those pivot around the corporate aspect of spirituality. If the exercise of spiritual gifts, the spiritual disciplines pivot around individual types of ideas focusing on self-actualization, then spiritual formation is reduced in the final analysis to ethical egoism baptized with Christian terms, but ethical egoism nonetheless. As important as mental health, self-knowledge, creativity, spontaneity, high self-esteem, personal happiness, individual freedom are, we as Christians need to realize that all of those must be defined in the context of the church in this corporate context, in the idea of growing up together in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Well, we’ve looked at one aspect of the psycho-culture ethical egoism. Remember the name ethical egoism comes from the fact that it’s not just your responsibility to be self-actualized to realize your full potential. But it becomes a moral imperative. It becomes sin not to realize your full potential. And this ethical egoism has permeated our society. Much, if not most of what people do today, much, if not most of what motivates people today is derived from this ethical egoism. Look around, read the paper, listen to the media, listen to friends. And unfortunately, it has also found its way into the church. And it has become one


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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of the factors, one of the reasons that has contributed to the biases, the predispositions, the presuppositions, the assumptions that have made up our very individualistic approach to spiritual formation, spirituality, and spiritual maturity. It’s one of those things that we need to help people recognize in themselves. As we try to incorporate the corporate models of spirituality, as we try to affect change in the church of Jesus Christ, we need to help people understand this particular bias. We need to help people understand that this is a part of their very being. It’s a part of their makeup. It’s a part of the world and the flesh for us today in the 20th century as we labor not to be conformed to the world but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. We need to realize that ethical egoism has become a very significant aspect of our mind, a very significant aspect of the flesh as we express that flesh today. It’s a very significant part of the world system in which we find ourselves. And, therefore, the renewing of our mind must deal with this. We must point it out to people and help them to see how it moves us from the New Testament pattern of growing up together to the very individualistic, spiritual self-actualization approach to spiritual formation. In the next session we will continue talking about the psycho-culture and look at the other factors, factors of psychotherapy, individualism, and then the feminist ideology.

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