Psychology and the Bible: Three Worlds of the Text

While biblical scholars have all too often remained skeptical, preachers and pastoral counselors have always known, consciously or not, that the Bible is a richly psychological document. Until recently, psychological biblical criticism has been one of the hidden avenues of biblical interpretation, made more inaccessible due to the lack of organization and coherence within the literature. Recent shifts in the discipline of biblical studies, along with the increasing influence of psychological perspectives on the culture in general have made psychological approaches to the Bible more visible. It is useful to identify three dimensions or levels of the biblical text: the world behind the text, the world of the text and the world in front of the text. Such a division can help to identify the goals of a particular psychological approach and the appropriateness of its aims.     

Psychology and violence against women

The discipline of psychology has made many contributions to the understanding of the social problem of men's violence against women during the past 15 years by reframing the problem as one of misuse of power by men who have been socialized into believing they are entitled to control the women in their lives, even by violent means. The new scientific psychology data base formed by integrating feminist gender analysis methods into more traditional psychological methodology is discussed, as are the implications of the resulting empirical data on which are based newer assessment, treatment, and forensic applications. A review of the major psychological advances in psychotherapy with women who have been sexual assaulted, exploited, and battered is presented, as well as implications for national policy. The feminist model presented is one in which science and practice concerns are carefully considered at all steps of the process. The article concludes with a discussion of the challenges involved in making the future training of psychologists more relevant to women's mental health concerns.     

Freud, Oedipus and the Hebrew Bible

The current paper examines the question of why Freud employed Greek rather than Hebrew foundation legends, specifically the story of Oedipus, as a basis for psychoanalysis, Freud's choice of Oedipus emanates from his deterministic view of the universe, paralleling the Greek rather that the Biblical story of creation. In the Biblical account God precedes and creates nature with no sign of an Oedipal conflict. In the Greek account, nature precedes the gods and the Oedipal conflict is inherent. Freud's choice has implications for his view of human psychology.     

The Bible, the Empire and the Other

Book reviewed in this article:
R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible in the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters     

Modern Philosophy,the Subject,and the God of the Bible

In my paper, I undertake to show that the God of the Bible is the subject of modern philosophy, i.e., that philosophy is biblical and that the Bible is philosophical. Central to the argument of my paper is an analysis of the fundamental difference between the philosophy of Aristotle (consistent with Socrates and Plato), as based on the law of contradiction and thus on the contradictory opposition between necessity and existence, and the philosophy of, in particular, Spinoza and Kant, as based on the transcendental logic of the necessary relationship of thought and existence. Thus, I argue that the ontological argument (proving the existence of God) demonstrates the necessary existence of the thinking subject and of the subject thought, at once human and divine. In short, metaphysics is practical reason, the practice of doing unto others what you want others to do unto you, and reason is metaphysical practice, the practice of proving that there is one thing that you, a subject, cannot think without it necessarily existing, and that is the other subject (the neighbor/God).     

Theology and narrative: the self,the novel,the Bible

This paper critically evaluates the work of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre by comparing their understanding of the narrative structure of selfhood with paradigms derived from three other sources: Heidegger’s conception of human being as Dasein; Rowan Williams’ interpretation of Dostoevsky’s theology of narrative; and Kierkegaard’s project of reading the Old Testament narrative of Abraham and Isaac as part of the Christian God’s autobiography. These comparisons suggest that Taylor and MacIntyre’s own narratives of Western culture lack a certain, theologically required openness to a variety of specific ways in which both individuality and history resist understanding in narrative terms as much as they demand it.     

Experiencing the Bible

This study uses interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative interview methodology, to examine the information experience of Catholic readers of the Bible. It presents a detailed, individual-focused account of how Catholics experience the Bible, in its diverse oral, print, and digital manifestations, as a source of religious information. Participants in this study were found to experience the Bible as God's Word, with which they interface in three thematic ways: Connections, Journey, and Practice. These themes are, in turn, linked by the processes of sharing, repetition, and interpretation. This work extends previous research on the religious reading of believers and numinous document experience, and it contributes to a budding conceptualization of reading as an example of document work rather than a merely cognitive activity.     

The Bible,Finland, and the Civil War of 1918

Reception history and the effective history of the Bible give a good paradigm to see the Bible in temporally and geographically different contexts. Here, I begin by discussing methodological issues of intertextuality, reception and effect. After that, I present two examples that illustrate the contextual possibilities of this paradigm. The first one is the use of the biblical lex talionis in the Finnish civil war of 1918. The second example is the modernist poet Edith Södergran, whose apocalyptic poems interpreted the same war. I argue that reception historical and effective historical approaches make it possible for biblical scholars to participate in the social and cultural discussions in their contexts.     

赫胥黎与《圣经》

赫胥黎是达尔文进化论的坚定捍卫者和热情发扬者。他以“不可知论”为武器,与基督教神学作了卓越的斗争。本文就其对《圣经》的态度所作的介绍,生动地体现着这一精神。     

Psychology and African-American women: Findings from applied research

The current applied research on African-American women is characterized by a limited focus on primarily poor and single mothers and comparative studies with white women. The resulting research ignores the diversity within African-American women generalizing from noncomparative or restrictive samples to all African-American women and provides narrowly focused and/or inappropriate research models in which to study the development of these women across the life span. This review focuses on some of this research as it relates to social context factors in African-American women's lives: social supports and parenting, work and self-esteem, gender role attitudes and marital life, and mental health. An examination of methodological problems and suggestions for future research is discussed.     

The Bible and psychology, an interdisciplinary pilgrimage

This article discusses the semantic issues regarding such terminology as the integration and interface of the discreet disciplines of Psychology, Theology, and Biblical Studies. It then defines a set of principles relevant to the interdisciplinary enterprise of relating these sciences. It suggests ideas for the illumination of psychological models with theological and biblical perspectives as well as for the employment of psychology as a new perspective from which to see the biblical text, offering new depths of understanding. This project is illustrated and illumined by observations upon the efforts of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies to wrestle with these issues, particularly through its main published organ, The Journal of Psychology and Christianity.This inevitably unfolds some of the story of the author's fifteen year pilgrimage as Editor of JPC and Executive Director of CAPS and endeavor to relate the sciences of Psychology and Theology, psychological experience and spirituality, emotional health and biblical faith. It is the first claim of this paper that the relationship of Psychology and the Bible is less a matter of integration of the two into each other's framework, scientifically or intuitively, and more a matter of that kind of interface between them which affords the mutual illumination of the two phenomena, knowing that these are two sources of insight and information in which truth is revealed about us, and therefore, presumably, about God who created, sustains, and heals us. It is the second claim of this paper that biblical interpretation, as text analysis, cultural understanding, literary-historical appreciation, and theology formation is an enterprise upon which all the tools of human inquiry must be brought to bear in order to distill from the text the full range of cognitive and affective import which it carries and offers the inquirer. Among these took are historical criticism, literary criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, textual criticism proper, and many others. Lately, some scholars such as Howard Clark Kee have attempted to bring sociological perspectives to biblical studies. Gerd Theissen has written on the psychological aspects of Pauline thought. This paper argues that the science and models of Psychology can be employed as a lens through which to see any text in fresh ways with productive results in new dimensions of insight.J. Harold Ellens isExecutive Director Emeritus of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies, Founding Editor and Editor in Chief Emeritus of the Journal of Psychology and Christianity, a retired Presbyterian theologian and pastor, and a licensed psychotherapist. He holds graduate degrees of MDiv from Calvin Theological Seminary, a ThM from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a PhD from Wayne State University.