Is Our Criticism Of Psychology Causing Harm?

In this regular feature, Dave and Tom respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call.Here’s this week’s question:Dear Mr. Hunt and Mr. McMahon:I’ve been listening to your program for a couple of weeks now because a friend of mine encouraged me to do so.She knows that I believe that Christian psychologists have made wonderful contributions to the body of Christ, and was hoping that your program would make me think otherwise.What I perceive to be hostility on your part truly saddens me, especially when it denigrates some of the most influential men in the church today:men like James Dobson, Gary Smalley, Norm Wright, Larry Crabb, Henry Cloud, John Townsend and a host of others I could name.While I concede there is a place for such a ministry such as yours, you do more tearing down than building up, whereas the men I mentioned are helping to put together broken lives.You should be encouraging them rather than undermining them.

Tom:

Well Dave, first of all, you know, there may be many in our audience that are agreeing with this one who wrote us the letter.On the other hand, I find it interesting that she’s naming these names,these psychologists, as the most influential men in the church today.Isn’t there something wrong with that at least?

Dave:

Tom, I would say it’s very wrong.Don’t we have anybody that preaches the Word?Wouldn’t the Word of God be more influential than Christian psychology, if that’s the case it’s a tragedy.

Tom:

That’s not the case.Well, what them helping put together broken lives?You know, I thank God if indeed this is happening in places, but on the other hand, if they are going by the men that we mentioned earlier in the program in our first segment, that can’t be, or at least they are introducing things that are—it’s like drinking from a polluted stream, Dave.It may keep you alive for a while, but you keep drinking from that, you are going to die.

Dave:

Well Tom, there are so-called remedies out there.You don’t want to take antibiotics all the time, then the germs or whatever become immune to them and that would kill you.Furthermore, it kills the good stuff along with the bad, that would be like a remedy.Or it might—Oh, yeah, it cured my flu, got me out of the flu, but so I just keep taking it.But I often put it like this:Rat poison is 99.6% nutritious, it has to taste good or rats are not going to eat it.It just has enough poison to kill.And lives put together, and lives helped—but Tom, I thought it was the Bible that promised this.I thought it was Jesus Christ who promised this.So, actually, the people who are seemingly being cured and blessed by Christian psychology, they are being turned away from Christ and being turned away from His Word!Jesus said, John 8:If you continue in MY Word, you will know THE truth, and THE truth will set you free.I guess we must have had a bit of a discussion about that, Walter Martin and I, on that program.This is a promise from Christ, and you know, I facetiously, maybe who knows how many times on this program I’ve done it, I don’t think too many times, but here’s the Christian psychologist translation of that:You continue in my Word, said Christ, you will know part of the truth and you will be set partially free, but I can’t set you totally free because, unfortunately, by ignorance or oversight the Holy Spirit has left out of the Bible certain things that are really essential to our well being—but one glad day these men of God, well, anti-Christians, atheists to a man, Rogers and Maslow and so forth, will come along, the new prophets of truth, and they will at last supply the church with the missing elements (that are not found in the Word of God.)Now Tom, if anybody can buy that, there’s no hope, we can’t even reason with them.But if they don’t buy that, then where are you looking?If the Bible is sufficient, then how can you say you being benefited by something else?

Tom:

Dave, this person’s complaint that we’re tearing down, rather than building up—I’m not sure whether it’s Tozer or Spurgeon perhaps, who said:What you needed to do was to cut down trees that these people were hiding behind, just as Adam and Eve hid from God when they sinned, and once the trees are cut down and their nakedness is revealed and they can come to the Truth, they’ve got nothing else to hang onto.So, what are we doing, are we doing that, are we tearing down, or are we trying to remove these obstacles that people are hiding behind?

Dave:

Tom, I think anyone who would read our newsletter, The Berean Call, would see, just in fairness, we spend more time teaching—I’m not going to call it positive, because positive and negative has nothing to do with Truth— but we give more time teaching from the Word of God, encouraging people, building them up in their faith.We’renotjust always knocking somebody down, or tearing down, which we do not intend to do at all, but most of the epistles were written to correct error,most of Christ’s ministry was correction.Is he going to build up the Pharisees?Is he going to build up people—I think we’ve documented pretty thoroughly that the Christian psychologist is walking according to the counsel of the ungodly.He is standing in the way of sinners, he’s sitting in the seat of the scornful, because these psychologists upon whom he is basing his teaching, they are scorners of the Word of God, they were anti-God, antichrist, and so forth.And yet, you are walking with them, and you are taking some of their theories, and now, we are going to build them up?But most of the epistles are written to correct error.Christ, much of what He said was to correct error, and I think we need to correct the Christian psychologist.That’s our obligation as the servants of the Lord seeking to uphold the Word of God, and they need to heed the counsel that we are giving them, and get back to the Bible!

Tom:

Dave, I started off with this:how can these men that we have named, that were named in this letter to us, how can they be the most influential people in the church?There’s something really wrong here!