Theology and psychological concepts of religiosity. The possibilities for interdisciplinary cooperation

Abstract

The article attempts to outline the possibilities of cooperation between theology and the psychology of religion. The author, using historical and comparative methods, analyzes various models of relations between contemporary theology and the psychology of religion. First, he shows the stages of the development of the Catholic Church's reference to specific sciences from the First Vatican Council to the present day, from recognizing the absence of contradiction between faith and science, through the recognition of the autonomy of theology among the positivistic sciences, to the stage of building cooperation in the post-conciliar period. It then suggests ways of presenting religious issues in various different types of psychology of religion (models of conflict, subordination, parallelism, and integration). The paper also undertaken an explanation of differences between methodological and ontological reductionism in psychologists' understanding of the Absolute as an object of religious relation. It cites D. M. Wulff’s two-dimensional summary scheme as an example of the extraordinary complexity of the problem psychology has in understanding religion. The author further analyzes the attempts at one-dimensional integration of theology and the psychology of religion (understood as two opposite poles of one continuum, where pastoral praxis is a search for the golden mean). Recognizing the inadequacy of these attempts, the author advocates a pluralistic translation of religious phenomena, i.e. interpreting the phenomenon under study based on both psychology and theology. Distinguishing between the empirical order and the revealed (the natural distinguished from the supernatural) in the dialogue between psychology and theology, he proposes to adopt the relationship of convergence rather than that of complementarity. The summary of the previous analyses is the two-dimensional model of cooperation between theology and the psychology of religion as outlined by the author.