From Christian Psychology Institute (CPI)
V. Ellsworth Lewis, Ph.D.
The Wisest Man in Athens: The Parting of Psychotherapy from Counseling
The intention of Christianity was: to change everything. The result […]: everything … remained as it had been, with just the difference that to everything was affixed the attribute “Christian.” — Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Moment
In his waning months, Soren Kierkegaard spent what was left of his father’s fortune on self-published tracts entitled “The Present Moment.” These pamphlets were projectiles hurled at Christendom for eviscerating the inwardness of faith. There has been controversy among experts over whether this flame-throwing represents the real Kierkegaard. C. Stephen Evans (personal communication, 2018) has said he believes Kierkegaard had lost his grip due to illness. Patrick Stokes (personal communication, 2019) has said he believes this finale was a logical culmination. “Steve Evans is wonderful; you were lucky indeed to study with him! […] I’m inclined to think SK didn’t lose his grip towards the end, so much as he just followed some of his other commitments through to their (not always palatable) logical conclusions.” Stokes’ view certainly comes nearer to Kierkegaard’s.
The controversy cannot be settled, but it can be approached from new angles. What makes Christian psychotherapy either Christian or psychotherapeutic? Both are central concerns of Kierkegaard, at the very core of his life’s work. From his doctoral dissertation, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, to his posthumous pamphlet My Task, Kierkegaard’s touchstone is definitional: “The only analogy I have before me is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task, to revise the definition of what it is to be a Christian.” Socrates had said “I know that I know nothing” while remaining steadfastly committed to knowing … and for this he was sought as a source of illumination. Socrates lived irony. Similarly, Kierkegaard says: “I do not call myself a Christian … It is this I must constantly reiterate … Yes, I know it well enough, it sounds almost like a sort of madness … [for one to say] of oneself, “I do not call myself a Christian,” and especially [for] one whom Christianity concerns to the degree that it concerns me.”
Kierkegaard refuses to call himself a Christian because he is “keeping the ideal free.” Free, we might say, of both the debris of knowledge and the hubris of knowing. “Shun the priests,” he begs. Shun those who have transcended Abrahamic fear and trembling, and who now “know” what it takes (for themselves and for others) to be Christians. For Kierkegaard, the paradigmatic moment of faith is the terrifying instant when Abraham believes he is being told to sacrifice Isaac. In that instant, no priest or prophet (or psychologist) can certify his belief. Few if any will support him, and many, if not all, will oppose him. He stands in solitary encounter with God. In Soren’s life, that paradigmatic crisis of faith arrived when he believed he was being asked to end his engagement to Regine Olson. Soren faced such crisis once again when he believed he was being asked to launch an attack on Christendom. In each case, the opinions of bystanders about what Abraham or Soren believed are worse than irrelevant. Such opinions, in sum, constitute what Kierkegaard called the “human-numerical [i.e., statistical] factor as the criterion of what truth, what Christianity is.” Put simply, they exteriorize the encounter with Christ, calling ordinary ground holy, and affixing “Christian” to a pedestrian social process.
How does Kierkegaard, as psychologist, attempt to interiorize the encounter with Christ? He uses every trick in the book, beginning with literary technique. His pseudonyms are designed to remove any vestiges of a priestly, finalizing voice. Should he be quoted, Kierkegaard pleaded to be quoted by pseudonym. He knew scholars would argue over which point of view was authentic, as if he were being coy. In this, we are sorely mistaken. His literary device was designed not to tease the reader by cloaking “the real Kierkegaard,” but to draw out the real self of a “solitary reader.” By obsessing over authentic content, one deprives oneself of an authentic process. The authentic process, one by which the reader becomes present to himself, could be called psychotherapeutic(a term not coined till 1853).
And yet there is content—radical content– without which Kierkegaard’s work would be a parlor game. Kierkegaard questions the presumptive goal of philosophy—objective or rationally unassailable truth. He reorients philosophy around a psychological and existential question: what shall I do? And in so doing, he finds an intersection of philosophy and psychology, gospel and faith. The pilgrim for which he writes either already knows, or soon discovers, that she must travel alone. She travels alone no matter how many thousands travel alongside her. The solitude of the process is unmitigated by the Mother Church, the Holy Scriptures, or the Angel Armies, for the pilgrims must hear precisely the voice that is audible only to them. Worse still, they may find it necessary to leap insilence. And if, by prophetic wonder, the voice meant for her were audible to others, they had best keep it secret. There can be no school of psychotherapeutic prophets.
I wish to suggest that the gap between Christian counseling and Christian psychology is (and should remain) as wide as the gap between Johannes Climacus and Soren Kierkegaard. The gap is (and should remain) as wide as the gap between Kierkegaard’s philosophical works and his pastoral works. The gap is (and should remain) as wide as the gap between apophatic (“negative”) and cataphatic (“positive”) theology. Kierkegaard maintained the distinction by sometimes publishing both pseudonymous and self-attributed works at the same time– one philosophical and the other pastoral. If this distinction is clear, then it should be obvious that most of what passes as Christian psychology is cataphatic, pastoral counseling. It relies on scriptural, theological, empirical, or even popular ideas to exert cognitive, emotional, and behavioral influence on clients. But Kierkegaard seems to have viewed himself as a psychologist not by virtue of his theological training or pastoral writing, but by virtue of his elusive philosophical work. If so, Kierkegaardian psychotherapy requires completely different gifts, temperament, professional identity, and supervised training. Alas, Kierkegaard’s sense of irony may be even rarer than his genius. The concept of psychotherapy “with continual reference to Socrates” may forever have few adherents.
