Quotable

There is absolutely no evidence that professional therapists have any special knowledge of how to change behavior, or that they obtain better results—with any type of client or problem—than those with little or no formal training....Different schools of therapy offer visions of the good life and how to live it, and those whose ancestors took comfort from the words of God and worshiped at the altars of Christ and Yahweh now take solace from and worship at the altars of Freud, Jung, Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis...and a host of similar authorities.

—Bernie Zilbergeld, clinical psychologist The Shrinking of America: Myths of Psychological Change

Psychiatry...[poses] as the true faith of “Mental Health.” It is a false Messiah.

—E. Fuller Torrey, psychiatrist The Death of Psychiatry

Under the influence of humanistic psychologists like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, many of us Christians have begun to see our need for self-love and self-esteem. This is a good and necessary focus.

—Bruce Narramore, You’re Something Special

[Today’s] Church indulges our desire to “feel good” instead of responding to our need to be spiritually challenged and fed through solid exposition of the Scriptures. The electronic Church in particular panders to our appetite for entertainment rather than authentic discipleship and maturity.

—Joyce Main Hanks, Preface to Jacques Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word

The devil does not understand real love and affection; but the child of God can tell the devil to his face that he loves God...and by God’s good help he means to cling to God through troubles tenfold heavier than those he has had to bear, should they come upon him.....In the night watches, when we are weary, and our brain is hot and fevered, and our soul is distracted, we yet confess that He is a blessed God....“Yes, that He is,” say the poor and needy....A blessed God? “Yes...He loves us, and we love Him, and, though all His waves go over us...we would not change with kings on their thrones, if they are without the love of God.”

—Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Pulpit, 1874, Vol XIX, p 60.