Dr. Leonard Greenway, pastor of the Riverside Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is in charge of Our Question Box. This department is for everyone. No signatures arc required and no names are published.
Although we are happy about the popularity of this department, we regret that, due to all the questions now on hand, no more should be sent until further notice. The patience of those with questions will therefore be appreciated.
From reader in Canada–
Question:
We gather from some things you have written that you do not have much appreciation for modern psychology. Is our observation correct, and, if so, would you make further comment?
Answer: I do not know what you are referring to. I wish you had been more specific. However, your query is before me and I shall give it a partial reply.
Along with many other people I appreciate the valuable insights given us by psychologists. They have come up with useful information and techniques which it would be stupid of us to ignore or belittle. They have enlarged our understanding of why people respond as they do to various stimuli, how our thinking relates to our emotions and our reactions, how children pass through significant stages in their development, etc. For all this we should be grateful.
However, we must be wary of being carried away by modem psychology (I am not now specifying all the different schools). Freud, for example, rendered a valuable service in uncovering the motivation of self-gratification in human nature, thus underscoring the teaching of Scripture that sinful man lives for himself. But we cannot go the rest of the way with Freud when he concludes that his selfishness is biologically inevitable and that when we neutralize conscience, we can accept ourselves as self-gratifying animals.
At the opposite end of this psychological spectrum is a teacher like Carl Rogers who warns us against Freud and then proceeds to give us something just as bad when he says that man is basically good and should be encouraged to express this goodness by relaxing restrictions. Rogers appears to me to come dangerously close to the position that the way to eliminate rebellion is to eliminate the laws against which we rebel. That is utterly unbiblical!
Correction
Due to a line being dropped in printing Our Question Box by Dr. Leonard Greenway, a sentence in the second paragraph on page 8 was changed to reads as follows: “On the one hand he [Dr. Verhey] accepts a less than literal interpretation of the stories of Jesus casting out demons.”
Unfortunately, this caused a misrepresentation because it says the exact .opposite of what Dr. Greenway had written: The sentence should read: “On the one hand he [Dr . Verhey] accepts a less than literal interpretation of the two passages mentioned above, and on the other hand he accepts a strictly literal interpretation of the stories of Jesus casting out demons.”
THE OUTLOOK regrets this inadvertent misrepresentation.