Lost Opportunities, Partial Successes, and Key Questions: Some Historical Lessons

Abstract

To shed light on some key perennial issues, I discuss several historical efforts to discern optimal understandings of human persons that take seriously both Christian faith and academic psychology. These include Gordon Allport's disguised integrative efforts; a 1924 book, An Elementary Christian Psychology; and Paul Meehl's 1958 integration book. I conclude that opportunities are lost: when seeking respectability becomes a primary motivator for Christians interested in psychology when psychology's implicit ethical and metaphysical assumptions are not recognized and critiqued, when efforts to create a Christian Psychology are based on a particular cultural-historical understanding of Christian faith that is assumed to be the only correct view of it, when Christians fail to engage with mainstream psychology when Christians fail to address rigorously key problems in the psychology/Christian faith interface, when Christians use ambiguous or supposedly neutral language to pursue Christian goals, and when Christians fail to work through thoroughly and develop fully the implications of Christian faith for our understandings of the psychological dimensions of embodied human persons.