The Bible, Wisdom and Human Nature
together, integration occurs when an element is added to a system. For our focus this faces us with the issue of whether psychology or theology is our system. Roberts, like Collins, Crabb and Hughes, is clear that our system is based on Scripture, Christian thought and practice. This is how practically they work out the notion of keeping Scripture ‘central’. Roberts’ (CP) approach helps us to question the establishment’s definition of psychology as a method (science) and so opens the way for a broader historical/ theological perspective concerning who may be considered psychologists of primary importance. Roberts offers a laudable challenge which seeks to retrieve the insights of thinkers of distinctively Christian psychology and translate them into our modern language. To illustrate Roberts’ point, it is worth noting how Christian Counselling students are familiar with the works of Rogers and Freud, but are not always critically aware of their particular anti-Christian bias, and how this impacts their ideas. These students may dismiss the likes of Aquinas and Augustine as being unscientific, pre-modern and non-psychologists, and thereby cast away rich treasures of biblically informed psychological work. This very process can be explained through Johnson’s notion of all intellectual authority being ‘kingdom work’ and thus spiritually and epistemologically ‘charged’. Thus Roberts, Crabb and Hughes’ approaches to integration are valid – a truly Christian approach must presume the relevance of, and be centred on the foundational ideas of the Bible, and of Christians down the ages, who have sought to apply its distinctive perspective. The notion of sin, which is the subject of the next section, is a good example of how the ‘kingdom struggle’ regarding concepts and use of distinctively Christian ideas and language, translates to counselling theory and practice. Based on this stance, we are not free to dismiss the concept of sin as outmoded, even if in our general culture and some of our churches, such language and concepts are increasingly avoided.
Sin As Anderson notes, there is no universal consensus regarding the definition of sin; this is partly a result of the variety of words used to describe sin in Scripture. This fact supports an approach to thinking about sin in a manner 32
The_bible_wisdom_and_human_nature_text_RPT.indd 32
27/03/2019 14:13
