Response #2

Psychological Research as a Source for Constructive Theology

Zahl consistently states that metaphysical realities with which theologians concern themselves never occur apart from the “irreducibility” of human psychology and physiology (77–78, 138, 151, 197). Christianity is not “invisible,” because “the Spirit’s work to transform Christians takes place ‘in time [through] forces that are embodied and open to view’” (99, 210). ² Zahl thus opens theology up to engage with psychology, not in order to lean on the authoritative status of empirical disciplines in contemporary society, but for a quite principled theological reason; affective experiences are described in Scripture as effects of the Spirit’s presence and work. In separating our descriptions of what we think the Spirit of God is or should be doing (i.e., what makes sense according to our favoured anthropologies or metaphysical frameworks) from close analysis of the affects that people experience, theologians “seal themselves off from the actual work of the Spirit in bodies and in the world” (70). Since the work of the Spirit is believed to have felt psychological effects, in principle the psychological sciences become a potential source of constructive theology.

What more can we say about the contribution of psychology to Christian Experience and The Holy Spirit, not merely in principle but in practice? I want to suggest that psychological science plays a significant role in Zahl’s book in three ways. First, the need for some psychologically substantial and experientially specific claims is affirmed in contrast to the “theological abstraction” of T.F. Torrance’s, and to a lesser extent Kathryn Tanner’s, doctrine of participation (70). Without description of the “psychologically necessary” affects, Zahl finds Torrance’s work, “vague,” a “banal and almost contentless assertation,” that “risks giving theological cover to all sorts of projection” and which through a “rhetorical sleight of hand” “creates the illusion of an experientially integrated and pastorally attuned doctrinal claim” (71–72, 98, 134). Zahl is certainly not pulling his punches here! This critique, however, needs to be balanced with an appreciation of the fact that the kind of “boldness” that characterises Zahl’s theology was made possible by Torrance’s (and others of his generation) argument that theology can be “scientific” and have a place in British universities. ³

Second, Zahl draws on recent social psychology of emotion to dissolve a false dichotomy within recent theology between so-called “individualistic” and “communal” models of salvation (134, 218). ⁴ Whereas Zahl’s critique of Torrance and Tanner is largely based on the absence of psychologically significant claims, Zahl’s critique of Milbank (and others) is based on correcting a substantial but erroneous psychological assumption already at work in contemporary theology. What we can take from this is the twofold principle: (i) theologians need to be bold enough to make empirical claims, rather than hide in the fortress of abstract metaphysics, and (ii) when they do theologians should do their best to realize this explicitly and check their accuracy against the relevant area of empirical research. This latter task is, of course, not easy and will likely require theologians to develop working-relationships with psychologists (or other scientists, depending on the content of their work) in order to stay on top of the literature in these other academic fields.

Third, Zahl models this principle when he uses attachment theory from social and personality psychology in a more directly constructive mode. Within only a few pages, attachment theory is put to work in Zahl’s theology in three ways: to articulate (1) how the emotions that result from divine grace (e.g., gratitude, love, joy, etc.) establish a relationship between the ascended Jesus and believers, (2) how the Spirit’s sanctification at the level of affects intervenes not only in individual sin, but also in the systemic structures of sin in the history of affective conditioning, and (3) to affirm an Augustinian view of holiness as “right desiderative attachment to God, mediated through the right ‘use’ of created things” (220–222). Although it is only a small section of Zahl’s book, this is a clear example of scientific studies and theories being used as a constructive resource for systematic theology.

Does such use of attachment theory run the risk of reducing theology to psychology? I do not think so. Neither the psychological theory of attachment nor the corrective appeal to the social psychology of emotion are used as the launching pad for a new doctrine detached from Scripture or tradition. Furthermore, Zahl is careful to employ psychology neither in determining, nor to the exclusion of articulating the “metaphysical substructure and content” of the gospel (197). Instead, theories in psychological science are brought in by Zahl only at a secondary stage in doctrinal theology, not as its primary authority or initial data point, but to aid in the interpretation of Scripture and in the evaluation of which voices in the tradition are most “pastorally, psychologically, and affectively plausible” (207, cf. 194, 234, 237). This interpretative and evaluative role certainly gives psychology some measure of authority and input within theology, but not at the cost of a theologians commitment to Scripture, tradition and experience as the primary means of God’s self-revelation.

For the most part, I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with Zahl that if theologians claim to be describing the ongoing work of the Spirit of God in human life, then some consideration of human affects and relevant psychological theories need to be included. We must stop referring to the Holy Spirit as self-effacing or as the “Cinderella” of the Trinity as an excuse not to do this (hard) work. Whilst I agree that psychological research and theories can inform, correct, and enhance various aspects of Christian theology–and for principled theological reasons–there are also some limits to the role psychology can take in constructive theology. Identifying limits is always of benefit to interdisciplinary work and should not be taken as a slight against either discipline. The appreciation of psychology’s limitations, however, allows both disciplines to offer their respective expertise with integrity and for scholars to bring the right tools to bare on different questions. It is to the limits that we now turn.

Changing Dance Partner: From Psychology to Therapy

Christian Experience and the Holy Spirit primarily recommends affect theory as the main theoretical lens for developing an experientially grounded soteriology and pneumatology. From reading this review, a reader might be forgiven for assuming that affect theory is itself a theory taken from psychological science. This is not true. Affect theory is a theory arising from critical discourse, from queer theory, feminism, and postcolonial theory. These critical discourses can sometimes be quite antithetical to aspects of contemporary science, whose pretences of objectivity, universality, and progress easily mask an oppressive domination. That Zahl endorses affect theory, as opposed to solely relying on what the psychological sciences reveal about the nature of emotions, suggests that he is aware (or at least intuits) that there are limits to the role that psychological science, as it is currently practiced, can have in systematic theology.

Affect theory is for Zahl, “a persuasive middle path” (158, cf. 100, 152, 235). But middle paths are often narrow, and travellers must always be on their guard not to fall to one side or the other. In particular, Zahl is walking a thin line between affects as practically recognizable but not externally evident, and between indeterminate abstraction (e.g., “affects” is still a vague term when used generally) and prescriptive legalism. Arguing that there needs to be some consideration of affects is a great deal easier than specifying what those particular affects might be. I want to ask Zahl: How specific and prescriptive should theologians be in describing what the work of the Holy Spirit feels like? Apart from projection from their own spiritual life, how might a theologian know what the Holy Spirit feels like to other people?

The intransigence of affects over long evolutionary timescales enables Zahl to draw on the tools of historical research methods without fear of anachronism, and so he commends the affect-laden soteriology of Phillip Melanchthon and the model of sanctification offered by Saint Augustine as psychologically plausible. But how can a theologian decide in a non-arbitrary or anecdotal manner which historical figures offers the most plausible account? Given that Zahl already brings in psychological theories to help evaluate and correct contemporary doctrinal proposals, could a psychological study on the affects associated with justification and sanctification inform this decision? Can the claim that a doctrine has particular “affective salience” be treated as a hypothesis? In this section, I explore two reasons why we should answer these latter two questions negatively, and why instead we should maintain the connection between theology and therapy.

First, although Zahl places a great deal of emphasis on the “practical recognizability” of affects as the “criterion of identifying” the Spirit’s activity, he denies that these affects are “externally evident and demonstrable” (75, 227). Here, I take Zahl to be warding off the critique that he uses affects as evidence or proof of salvation (134, 201). Affects are described as necessary for human psychology, but are not strictly necessary for the Spirit to save. However, I doubt that this distinction is sustainable. Furthermore, it points to a tension in Zahl’s argument. If affects cannot function as external evidence, or are not demonstrable to others, then how can we examine affects to see if they are intransient across different cultures and historical time periods as they are claimed to be, or to see what factors are most determinative in shaping their moderate plasticity? If affects are the main material that the Spirit uses in bringing people to salvation and sanctification, then how can they not function as a form of evidence with which believers assure themselves (and via testimony if not performance, assure others) of the Spirit’s work? If a theologian agrees with Zahl that affects are important–what then?

When Zahl talks about “practical recognizability,” he primarily means that affects are felt by the experiencer and recognizable to a person from the inside (78). Yet both Zahl and contemporary psychologists are fairly sceptical of an individual’s ability to accurately recognize and describe their own affective states with accuracy, a principle Zahl refers to as “the problem of the inscrutability of the self” (202). This Augustinian principle came late in Zahl’s book, and it left me wondering what its impact on the overall argument would have been if it had been introduced earlier. Due to well-documented cognitive biases in human thinking, psychologists also rarely rely solely on individual self-description or qualitative data gathering, although this method might be incorporated as one part of a larger study. ⁵

Instead, psychologists “operationalise” the core concepts under investigation to try and measure human behaviour in a more quantifiable way. ⁶ For example, a false-belief test is an attempt of operationalizing a concept called “theory of mind,” in order to infer from the results of the test what children believe about the kind of knowledge other people have access to. The advantage of such an approach for psychologists is an increased ability to reliably replicate and predict certain results, as well as to make fairly abstract ideas open to more statistical analysis. The cost is that this moves the results of the experiment further away from the concept one wanted to understand in the first place as it is used in ordinary discourse. Psychologists can be rather ingenious in devising methods to operationalize concepts to make them open to empirical measurement, but phenomenological affects and the work of the Spirit strike me as particularly difficult cases. Even if Zahl wants to draw a line from the work of the Spirit to felt experience, there is no straight line from felt experience to function or behaviour. Moreover, as noted above, Zahl has already ruled out for purely theological reasons that affects could be used as external evidence that the Spirit is at work in a person’s life.

One example of a doctrine or phenomenon that Zahl argues is practically recognizable is sin. Reinhold Niebuhr famously referred to the doctrine of original sin as “the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.“ ⁷ But this is to claim too much. We cannot prove the existence of sin in the laboratory or the lecture hall, nor do we need to. Its symptoms, its affective salience, is keenly felt in other places, most notably the therapist’s couch. Instead of psychological science, we might speak of “practical recognizability” as a concept more at home in clinical psychology, or a therapeutic setting. Perhaps a better definition of what it means for an event or object to be “practically recognizable” is that we can meaningfully ask the subject: “And how does that make you feel?”

It is often said that, in contrast to previous centuries, the concept of “sin” is foreign, alien and inaccessible to the contemporary Western experience. By contrast, the numbers of people talking to therapists and counsellors continues to rise; there is scope here to believe that what has changed is the discursive practice not the experience itself, what was once felt to be a symptom of sin is now called “distress,” “illness,” “compulsion,” “anxiety” or “a difficult time.“ ⁸

Most people enter therapy to seek help; there is an affect, a behaviour, or an experience that needs to be worked through because it is preventing the person from flourishing, or even functioning in their daily life. The person recognises the need for outside help to understand their situation and even to understand themselves. Anyone who has had therapy will know that it rarely feels “therapeutic” in the moment, in the sense of a relaxing, cosy or pleasurable experience. Therapy can be hard and deeply painful in what it reveals, and yet in the relationship with the therapist (ideally), there is sufficient grace to be able to proceed. Already, we have here an echo of the pattern of the gospel; “Those who are well have no need for a physician, but those who are sick; I have come not to call the righteous but sinners” (Mark 2:17) (175).

Zahl emphasises that for theology to be cut off from felt experience of bodies is to sever the link between the Holy Spirit and sin. Such a severing in our theologies has made it appear as if the Holy Spirit is absent from our world, and has reduced the category of “sin” to “the tracking of moral culpability,” a “hollow and moralizing” concept easily “co-opted for use in human power games” (160, 181). In drawing our attention to the role of the Spirit as the one who convicts us of sin (John 16:8), Zahl draws heavily on medical language. The Spirit is described as working with a “compassionate diagnosis that is always ordered to an infinite grace” (181, italics added). It is only by encounter with the Holy Spirit “the many symptoms of sin” are revealed, “that ‘the sinner is discovered to himself’ and the nature of the ‘disease’ is diagnosed in its countless instantiations” (195). Such medical language to describe the experience or effect of sin has a long pedigree in Christian theology, and Charles Taylor highlights its relevance in “the therapeutic turn.“ ⁹ It provides an important corrective to the modern tendency to equate sin with culpability and allows Zahl to articulate humanity’s helplessness. ¹⁰ As he continues, “sometimes it is less a matter of conviction as such than of simply becoming more aware of some plight we are in, and of our need for rescue from it” (195). The need for theology to restore the connection between the work of the Spirit and the experience of sin, as a kind of diagnostic-therapy is surely one of the keenest insights of Christian Experience and the Holy Spirit. Although, I am left wondering, when the doctrine of sin is recovered from its modern distortions; what role should the category of “sin” play in contemporary theological engagement with mental illness? Sin is a kind of illness, but is all illness a symptom of sin? This is surely an urgent and difficult question that Zahl’s work leads us to ask but does not attempt to answer. ¹¹

Second, and more surprisingly, Zahl locates this aspect of the Spirit’s work in justification, regeneration, and sanctification under the auspices of the doctrine of providence. The reason seems to be (following Kathryn Tanner in her critique of charismatic enthusiasm) to deny any notion that the Spirit’s work is “a miraculous overriding of existing human capacities” (205). ¹² To attribute the Spirit’s activity to providence is to claim that this particular work of the Spirit is so widespread that it is indistinguishable from non-soteriological human affects, if indeed there are any non-soteriological experiences on such a view (215). Furthermore, Zahl is clear that affects are formed through the adaptive pressures of evolution, and so they are not particular to Christians, nor even unique to the human species (156, 163, 222, 224). Evolved human capacities and ordinary activities are just what psychologists (and cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, etc.) investigate, so it would seem that depicting the work of the Spirit as part of God’s providence would open the Spirit’s work up to empirical investigation.

However, the widespread and indistinguishable nature of the Spirit’s actions “in the working of providence,” means that psychologists could never pinpoint or isolate a particular affect or even pattern of affects as theologically salient (213, cf. 208, 215). Here we run into the old problem of picking out the particular presence of the Spirit from the omnipresence of God. In terms of using psychology as a constructive resource here, the universal scope of providence means that there can be no control against which these affects are compared or contrasted. Psychological research most often works from the particular, testing a sample size or selection of a given population, and then seeks to generalize these results out onto larger populations. To place an effect under the aspect of providence is to obscure any particular starting point from which wider generalizations can be made. Furthermore, despite the cosmic scope of providence, this generalizability is not possible when discussing the work of the living Spirit of God, whose freedom means that “the transformation of desire will never take place in exactly the same way twice” (215). Were it possible to construct an experiment to operationalize the affects that result from the work of the Spirit, we could never replicate these results. This leads Zahl to wisely conclude that sanctification “is not a science. It is a living ‘drama,’ shaped by the freedom of the Spirit” (230).

These same limits do not apply to the methods of narrative-therapy. Whilst “providence” has often been used to refer to the pre-determined rule and guidance of God over all of nature and history, Zahl’s discussion of providence surprisingly focuses in on (Augustine’s analysis of) the story of Peter’s betrayal and tearful repentance (207). What seems particularly important to Zahl is that the reader (and Peter) can make sense of his tears only within a longer narrative of apparently ordinary events (a prior conservation, the crowing of a cockerel). The Spirit was weaving this moment of transformation into Peter’s story long before the night of Jesus’ arrest. David Fergusson’s recent work stresses the “improvising power of divine providence,” which secures “meaning and positive outcomes from the most unpromising of circumstances.“ ¹³

Helpfully, Zahl explicitly contrasts this “making sense” and plausibility with any stronger notion of explanation (207). Peter’s narrative does not explain his transformation, but it provides the necessary context for his transformation to make sense and to be meaningful. On occasion, theology can and does offer more high-octane explanations, but the doctrine of providence is not one such instance. Instead, insofar as the doctrine of providence describes divine improvisation rather than divine determinism, it offers up plausible patterns, (e.g., law/gospel, crucifixion/resurrection, etc.) which help individuals form an interpretative narrative out of their experiences and make meaning out of even the darkest periods of a life. Theology, then, like therapy is a discursive practice, whose success depends in large part upon its ability to discern patterns and to make narrative sense of what the Spirit is already doing (135–41). ¹⁴

Conclusion

Simeon Zahl’s Christian Experience and The Holy Spirit is not overtly interdisciplinary and does not set out to discuss the possibility or procedures of integrating theology with either the psychological sciences or therapeutic practice. Zahl merely gets on with the task of systematic theology as best he knows how. And yet, for decidedly theological reasons, the theological method that Zahl advocates allows, if not requires, theologians to draw upon the resources of these other disciplines and contexts in order to maintain that what theologians say is fully rooted in the work that the Spirit is doing in people’s bodies.

In the first section, I outlined three ways that psychological research makes a positive contribution to Zahl’s work, both in regard to what Zahl says regarding theological methodology (first) and then (second and third) with regard to the content of Zahl’s soteriology. The second section took a more via negativa approach to the question of how psychological science might be a source for theology, by considering the limits of such work. ¹⁵ Instead, I offered an alternative connection, that between theology and therapy. This route too will have its limits. But I suggested that one of the chief ways to see the affective salience of doctrine is to consider its connection to and power within a therapeutic context. The implication, then, is that the therapist’s question, “And how does this make you feel?” is also a theological question.