Psychology of Religion Seminar

Randall Hoedeman, Ph.D.

Pittsburgh Pastoral Institute

 

Yes, the gods will be present, but in what form and to what purpose?

(Oracle at Delphi)

I. Introduction

A. The above Delphic oracle was given to the Lacedaemonians on the eve of their battle with the Athenians. It came in response to the question: "Will the gods be present on the battlefield and, if so, on whose side?"
  1. As a pastoral counselor who daily sallies forth to battle the forces of so-called "psychopathology" and "dysfunctional" family systems, I too am a faithful inquirer after religious oracles. One of the shrines I regularly visit is devoted to the "gods" of the psychology of religion. They assure me that, via their psychological images or representations, they too will be present, at least unconsciously.
  2. But in what form and to what purpose? These are the two main topics of the seminar. They will be explored under the following main headings:

    • I. Introduction — pp. 1-9
    • II. Individual/Subjective Religious Experience (Personal Theology) — pp. 10-23
    • III. Communal/Intersubjective Religious Experience (Corporate/Dogmatic Theology) — pp. 24-32
    • IV. Developmental Religious Experience (Historical/Process Theology) — pp. 33-43
    • V. Pathological Religious Experience (The Gods Must Be Crazy) — pp. 44-57
    • VI. Psychotherapy and Religious Experience: General Guidelines — pp. 58-72
    • VII. Psychotherapy and Religious Experience: Specific Issues and Themes — pp. 73-88
    • VIII. Conclusion: Back to the Garden of Eden — pp. 89-90.
B. Religious experience, in its many forms, moods, beliefs, and intensities, is exceedingly widespread–perhaps, in the broadest sense, universal.
  1. "Surveys have found that 93% of Americans identified with a religious group and over 80% reported that religion is ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ important in their lives" (Shafranske, p. 1). As a pervasive cultural force in America, religion and its institutions are in the air we breath and, at least during national elections, can be crammed down our throats. To live in our, and probably every, society is to be forced to come to some sort of terms with the impact of religion.

  2. Moreover, life compels each of us to ponder those maddeningly elusive, often burning, existential mysteries: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? To be in the world is to be plunged into life’s plethora of questions, conflicts, ambiguities, absurdities, inequities, tragedies, polarities, possibilities, and limitations. To exist at all is to exist in that particular place and time where, without informed consent, we have been "thrown" and out of which we one day will be taken–all because we were conceived, against all odds (roughly one in 700 trillion), by a "shot in the dark" (if there ever was one). Typically, the basic answers to life’s ultimate questions shape themselves into some sort of religious (or unreligious or antireligious) "grand narrative"–what Eric Fromm (1947) calls "a frame of orientation and an object of devotion" (p. 48), and what Ernest Becker describes as "some [transcendent] system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us" (p. 55). Such a grand narrative attempts: (1) to account for our fragile, brief, and ambiguous existence in the vast cosmos; (2) to infuse our lives with some sort of meaning and purpose; and (3) to bolster our efforts in the life-long job of growing, defining, and maintaining the self that we did not create but, nevertheless, are stuck with. Or as Leo Tolstoy (1987b) succinctly puts it: "The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me" (p. 134)? Unfortunately, this question is far more easily asked than answered; moreover, all of the honest answers still leave us wandering about in a good deal of darkness–but also in good company: "Our whole life, Travelers," said I, "is a story more or less intelligible, –generally less; but we shall read it by a clearer light when it is ended. I, for one, am so divided this night between fact and fiction, that I scarce know which is which" (Charles Dickens, 1996, p. 77).
  3. And then there are life’s unrelenting daily pressures, concerns, and challenges (like getting out of bed some mornings). They have been known to prompt frequent utterances of what contemporary Christian writer Anne Lamott, who numbers herself among the spiritual strugglers and stragglers of this world, cites as her most basic of all prayers: "Help me, help me, help me!" "Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
C. A broad spectrum of religious options and accompanying god-images is available in responding to life’s call for an ultimate frame of reference to ground our existence and to get us through each day. Opposite extremes are exemplified by two of my "patron saints": John Calvin, a fervent theist (and the mastermind and constructor of my childhood faith), and Sigmund Freud, an ardent atheist (and a masterful "de-constructor" of that faith, plus a chief instigator in the intractable conflict between my adulthood faith and "unfaith"). By way of whetting the theological appetite and stirring the religious imagination, the following material surveys, compares, and contrasts some of the basic options on the religious spectrum (e.g., traditional theism, deism, pantheism, mysticism, atheism, and agnosticism), and also discusses the insoluble theological problem of finding an adequate "language" by which to "talk" about God.
  1. Theism is the belief in the existence of a god or the gods–a category of being which henceforth will be designated by the catchall term "God." More specifically, theism tends to refer to "belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of [humanity] and the world and who transcends yet is immanent in the world" (Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary). Such, in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Peter and Paul, and the God of Mohammed.
  2. This relatively "transcendent," yet "personal" and "immanent," theistic God contrasts with the more abstract and impersonal "God of the philosophers"–who either deistically is so remotely transcendent as to be blind, deaf, and dumb to the machinery and pathos of the universe or pantheistically is so immanently One with the universe as to have no discernibly separate existence.
  3. Traditional theism also can be distinguished from "eastern religions" (or so-called perennial philosophies), like Hinduism and Buddhism, whose concept of God transcends all categories of being–no matter how powerfully, perfectly, enormously, or eternally they are defined. By definition, such a God is indescribable and inconceivable. In fact, it cannot rightly be said that this God even exists in the same sense that anything else exists. Rather, it must be said that God is existence. This wholly transcendent and wholly immanent ground of everything that is is called Brahman in Hinduism and Sunyata in Buddhism.
    1. Descriptively, the only road of approach to this God is the via negativa, the "negative way," which can state for sure only that which God is not. The utter ineffability of God, who is neither being nor nonbeing, necessarily renders false and misleading any and all positive descriptions. Thus, according to Hindu scholar S. Radhakrishnan, the Upanishads, as basic Hindu scripture, indulge in negative accounts, that the Real is not this, not this (na iti, na iti), "without sinews, without scar, untouched by evil," "without either shadow or darkness, without a within or a without." [Moreover,] the Bhagavad-Gita supports this view of the Upanishads in many passages. The Supreme is said to be "unmanifest, unthinkable and unchanging" (pp. 21-22).
    2. Similarly, in the Vedanta, the system of Hindu philosophy based on the Upanishads, Brahman is almost always described by negations–the nondual, the nonfinite, the formless, the nonparticular" (Watts, p. 36).

    3. Consequently, intellectual approaches to God are radically negated. To "know" God is to experience a relatively mindless and wordless mystical union with the Unknowable and the Indescribable. Radhakrishnan elaborates:
    4. Strictly speaking we cannot give any description of Brahman. The austerity of silence is the only way in which we can bring out the inadequacy of our halting descriptions and imperfect standards. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad says: "Where everything indeed has become the Self itself, whom and by what should one think? By what can we know the universal knower?" . . . The eternal One is so infinitely real that we dare not even give It the name of One since oneness is an idea derived from wordly experience (vyavahara). We can only speak of It as the non-dual, advaita (p. 21)

    4. In modern Protestantism a revised, updated, and somewhat "dialectical" version of the negative way has been popularized by Paul Tillich and his efforts to speak meaningfully about "God." One of the twentieth century’s most influential theologians, Tillich's representative statements (as quoted in Kaufmann, 1958) include: "The very term ‘existence of God’ is almost blasphemous"; "Every true theistic statement must be contradicted by an atheistic statement"; and "It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it" (p. 178). Therefore, all "true" statements about God must contain a yes and a no: Yes, God does exist; No, God does not exist (in any sense that we an conceive or speak of "existence"). Relying heavily on ontological language, the most Tillich (1955) can say on a purely positive theological note is that God is "being-itself":

    The search for ultimate reality beyond everything that seems to be real is the search for being itself, for the power of being in everything that is. It is the ontological question, the root question of every philosophy. . . . The God who is a being is transcended by the God who is Being itself, the ground and abyss of every being. And the God who is a person is transcended by the God who is the Personal-Itself, the ground and abyss of every person (pp. 13, 82-83).

    Elsewhere (1952), he calls this God "the God above God" (p. 182).

    5. In stark contrast to the "impersonal," "a-personal," or "trans-personal" God of ontology, the negative way, and mysticism, John Calvin, positively, dogmatically, and systematically set forth a more traditional theism in his clearly and beautifully written Institutes of the Christian Religion, the first and most enduring work of "systematic theology" from the Protestant Reformation. (Throughout the seminar, I will use illustrations and examples from my childhood Calvinism. Rather than becoming overbearing or boring, I hope they will put flesh and bones on abstract concepts, as well as, by way of comparison and contrast, activate religious themes and memories from the childhood experience of seminar participants.) Calvin’s intellectually laden "grand narrative" begins with the words:

    Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. . . . For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. . . . On the other hand, it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself (p. 7).

    a. In contemplating the "face of God" we encounter a number of divine attributes, including perfect and everlasting "compassion, goodness, mercy, justice, judgement, and truth" (p. 39). Above all, however, Calvin insists on an eminently personal, communicative, and interactive God who abounds toward us in steadfast love and mercy, yet also meets out severe justice and retribution, as was proclaimed by Moses in Deuteronomy 34: 6-7:

    The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.

    b. In one of the most remarkable mental health statements of all time, Calvin then details that which we first discover about ourselves after gazing into the dazzling light of God’s holiness: "clear evidence of our injustice, vileness, folly, and impurity"; plus an awareness of "the greatest iniquity . . . extreme folly . . . and the most miserable impotence" (p. 8). Such, according to Calvin, is our natural state of "reprobation" and "original sin." Consequently, and apart from God’s mercy and grace, we all are doomed to a horrible and unspeakable state of eternal damnation: "As language cannot describe the severity of the divine vengeance on the reprobate, their pains and torments are figured to us by corporeal things, such as darkness, wailing and gnashing of teeth, inextinguishable fire, the ever-gnawing worm (Matt. 8:12; Mark 9:43; Isa. 66:24)" (p. 537). This bit of vintage Calvin introduces his views on the optimal psychological effects of true religion–a topic we will explore further in discussing "pathological" religious experience. It also portrays the "face of God" with something other than a friendly smile.

    c. Not content to describe his theism, Calvin also attempted to prescribe it for all of sixteenth century Geneva by politically instituting it as the law of the land. Realizing that they couldn’t live with him, the citizens soon ran him out of town. Apparently, they then discovered that they couldn’t live without him and implored him to return!

    6. In fortuitous opposition to Calvin’s darkly brooding and wrathful God stands the theistic God who undergirds what William James terms the religion of healthy-mindedness. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, his 1902 landmark study of the psychology of religion, James quotes the eminent Unitarian preacher and writer Edward Everett Hale as a "healthy-minded" example:

    . . . any man has an advantage . . . who is born, as I was, into a family where religion is simple and rational; who is trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was always glad to receive his suggestions to me. . . . A child who is taught early that he is God’s child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good (p. 95).

    a. Such a theological foundation serves well those contemporary preachers who stress the power of positive thinking and of possibility thinking. One of the stranger incongruities in this regard has got be the fact that both of the foremost modern preachers and best-selling authors of these perspectives–the late, positive-thinking Norman Vincent Peale (of the historic Marble Collegiate Church on the east coast) and the possibility-thinking Robert Schuller (of the nationally-televised Crystal Cathedral on the west coast)–are ordained ministers in the Reformed Church in America, a denomination founded on and grounded in Calvin’s Institutes!

    b. A theological perspective like Hale’s also breeds the type of believer whom Francis Newman calls once-born rather than twice-born. Instead of needing to be "born again" because of their vile and irredeemable sinful natures, the "once-born" see God

    not as a strict Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate, but as the animating spirit of a beautiful and harmonious world, Beneficient and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure. . . . In fact, they have no vivid conception of any of the qualities in which the severer Majesty of god consists. He is to them the impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. . . . Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts and not very much in the world . . . and they have a certain complacency and perhaps a romantic sense of excitement in their worship (James, p. 93).

    This quote prompted James to recall a woman who described to him "the pleasure it gave her to think that she could ‘cuddle up to God’" (p. 93n.). Which brings us to the next section and Freud’s psychoanalytic critique of religion, along with his related atheism.

7. Atheism is, of course, disbelief in the existence of God.

a. Sigmund Freud, a thoroughgoing atheist (whose epochal book The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, just prior to James’ Varieties), still found religion sufficiently engaging to address its psychological dynamics throughout his writing and to devote three books to it: Totem and Taboo (1913), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and Moses and Monotheism (1938). In Totem and Taboo, he concludes, through "psychoanalytic investigation," that the theistic "god at bottom is nothing but an exalted father" (p. 921), which we ourselves conjure up and place in the heavens for our imagined protection. He elaborates this conclusion in The Future of an Illusion:

As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused a need for protection–for protection through love–which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one (p. 47).

Thus it is that we create our "Father who art in heaven" (rather than the reverse) and, according to Freud (1927), earnestly hope and pray for three main blessings in return: (1) he "must exorcise the terrors of nature"; (2) he "must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death"; and (3) he "must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them" (p. 24).

b. While refraining from prescribing his atheistic "frame of orientation" for everyone, Freud (1927) did view it as the only reasonable position of mature adults–of those who have surmounted the childishly "neurotic" need for religion’s consoling illusions:

Perhaps [such persons], not suffering from neurosis, will need no [religious] intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the center of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children forever; they in the end go out into "hostile life." We may call this "education to reality. " . . . Then with one of our fellow unbelievers they will be able to say without regret, "We leave the heavens to the angels and the sparrows" (pp. 81-82).

c. In one important sense, of course, we are all atheists. Psychoanalyzed or not, each of us is an "atheist" relative to those gods we know we definitely do not believe in. Likewise, judged by the standards of any religion other than our own, we are all deemed heathens, heretics, idolaters, or infidels of one kind or another.


8. Somewhere in between theism and atheism lies agnosticism–the belief that ultimate reality, whether divine or otherwise, is unknown and unknowable.

a. According Baker’s Dictionary of Theology, the term "agnostic" was coined by Thomas Huxley in 1869 at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society, where he referred to himself as "a-gnosis"–"without knowledge." With this play on the Greek word gnosis, which means special knowledge or enlightenment regarding the ultimate nature and meaning of things, Huxley distanced himself from "gnostics" of all stripes with their claims of special revelation from, or true knowledge about, God.

b. In a similar spirit, this seminar, in its investigation of the psychology of religion, will attempt to proceed, as far as possible without "gnosis"; that is, without trying to affirm, deny, prove, or disprove the actual existence of God. Hence, we will draw a sharp line of demarcation between two basic questions–one answerable and one unanswerable.

1) As for the answerable question, and the theme of the seminar: What are the nature and purposes of our personal and highly subjective psychological "images" or "representations" of God–those complex mental creations constructed out of the god-materials we have appropriated from each layer of our developmental history and that depict many of our basic intrapsychic, interpersonal, and existential hopes, dreams, wishes, fears, conflicts, and longings?

2) As for the unanswerable question: Does God really exist and, if so, what god-images most closely correspond to this divine existence? Or, stated conversely, do all of our god-images, no matter how divinely inspired they might claim to be, exist solely in our minds and, therefore, correspond to Nothing, whatsoever?

For some tranquil souls, this unanswerable question is of relatively mild and passing interest. The following matter-of-fact response to a survey sent out by Stanford professor Edwin Starbuck, a contemporary of William James and a psychology-of-religion pioneer, illustrates such a soul (as quoted in James, pp. 105-107):

Q. What does Religion mean to you?

A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe, useless to others. I am sixty-seven years of age and have resided in X. fifty years, and have been in business forty-five, consequently I have some little experience of life and men, and some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious people are as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and morality. The men who do not go to church or have any religious convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious–they teach us to rely on some supernatural power when we ought to rely on ourselves. I teetotally disbelieve in God. The god-idea was begotten in ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature. If I were to die now . . . I would rather die with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die–there being no immortality in either case.

Q. What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God, Heaven, Angels, etc?

A. Nothing whatever.

Q. Have you had any experiences which appeared providential?

A. None whatever. There is no agency of the superintending kind. A little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific law will convince any one of this fact.

Q. What things work most strongly on your emotions?

A. Lively songs and music . . . . I greatly enjoy nature. . . . I attend lectures when there are any good ones. All my thoughts and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I regard as the deepest law.

Q. What is your notion of sin?

A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental to man’s development not being yet advanced enough. Morbidness over it increases the disease. We should think that a million of years hence equity, justice, and mental and physical good order will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any idea of evil of sin.

As for James’ assessment of this decidedly nonheavenly-minded survey-respondent:

If we are in search of a broken and contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother. His contentment with the finite incases him like a lobster shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance from the infinite. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism which may be encouraged by the popular science.

On the other hand, questions of the existence and nature of God can be burning issues for those of us who are not so contentedly encased in our finitude, or who, as James elsewhere puts it, experience religion "not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever" (p. 9). This can be a highly contagious state of mind whose typical symptoms include heated debates, on the outside, and, on the inside, the mental anguish produced by what has been classified in Latin as an obsessio. Theologian W. Paul Jones elaborates:

An obsessio is whatever functions deeply and pervasively in one’s life as a defining quandary, a conundrum, a boggling of the mind, a hemorrhaging of the soul, a wound that bewilders healing, a mystification that renders one’s living cryptic. Whatever inadequate words one might choose to describe it, an obsessio is that which so gets its teeth into a person that it establishes one’s life as a plot. It is a memory which, as resident image, becomes so congealed as Question that all else in one’s experience is sifted in terms of its promise as Answer. Put another way, an obsessio is whatever threatens to deadlock the Yeses with No. It is one horn that establishes life as dilemma. It is the negative pole that functions within one’s defining rhythm. The etymology of the word says it well: obsessio means "to be besieged" (p. 27).

c) And what is that we besieged and beleaguered "theological obsessives" long for? Nothing less than epiphania: a heavenly appearance of some sort; a revelation that uncovers and sheds light upon the divine hiddeness; an epiphany that attests to God’s existence and presence (even if only as a "still, small voice" within). More often than not, however, we are stuck with an unrequited longing in which obsessio is constant, and epiphania, if she appears at all, is fleeting and elusive (if not illusive).

c. The answer to the unanswerable question ultimately requires what Kierkegaard calls a "leap of faith." In contrast, most of this seminar attempts to answer the answerable question and, therefore, will proceed on a purely "psychological" basis. By temporarily "bracketing" our ultimate (religious, unreligious, or antireligious) faith-commitments, beliefs, and obsessions, we will attempt to work as descriptively as possible in exploring such issues as:

1) The importance of religion in the personal psychology of most, if not all, people (e.g., 80% and 93% of the Americans surveyed above), with a particular emphasis on the important "psychological needs" that can be met through religious faith.

2) The great diversity in religious experience, along with the remarkable variety of corresponding god-images in the human psyche. It is important to note that the term "god-image" is used in a gender-neutral fashion to include both masculine and feminine (or "goddess") images.

(Parenthetically, and stylistically, it also might be well to note here that, although I use gender-neutral language in my own writing, many of the writers whom I will be quoting date themselves by not doing so. I quote them because, to my knowledge, no one else has stated better their particular insights and observations. Still, the generic use of terms like "man" and "mankind" grates on my ears. To what extent their related comments reflect a patriarchal or sexist bias I hope will become a lively part of our seminar discussion.)

3) Basic psychological dimensions of religious experience and belief–including the developmental processes of formation during childhood and of life-long transformation.

4) Implications for psychotherapy–which also might involve a little bit of theological speculation on the actual existence of God.

d. This "descriptive" exploration of the psychology of religion does not intend to reduce religious experience to a purely psychological phenomenon. Nor does it imply that religious commitments are merely products of psychological needs and wishes, with no ontological grounding or ultimate reality to sustain them. While it might indeed be the case that all religious hopes and beliefs are nothing more than the products of wishful, need-based thinking, it also stands to reason that authentic religious beliefs or experiences, by their very nature, would address vital human needs. One could reasonably expect that a Divine Creator/Savior, intimately acquainted with "his" or "her" people, would respond in ways that meet their deepest needs and longings.

1) Whatever the ultimate truth, or untruth, of the matter, I hope the seminar will be of use (both personally and clinically) to those of us who, along with our clients, have ever engaged in a fervid, no-holds-barred, wrestling match with a formidable religious obsessio. And, like Jacob wrestling all night with his angel, perhaps we too can limp off in the morning with a bit of a blessing (Gen. 32:24-32).

2) Perhaps the following "serenity / desperation" prayer, authored and prayed daily by an honestly and courageously agnostic client (whose life story provides him with ample cause for hedging his theological bets), is a good way to close this introduction to the seminar:

 

 

Dear God,

If you are there and can hear me,

And whoever or whatever you might be,

And if you are not averse to helping,

And if you are able to do so,

I, for one, am not averse to being helped.