I believe in Christianity as I believe that

the sun has risen, not only because I see

it but because by it, I see everything else.

About This Book

Imagine for a moment that you are going to visit New York City for the first time. Your trip is only a few days away, and with each day that passes, you can feel your excitement building. You download the New York subway app on your phone, read up on some good restaurants that you want to visit, pick out some shows that you want to see, and pack your coat because it’s fall. Since your best friend from high school has moved to New York to attend university there, you’ve had a standing invitation to come visit. She has offered to show you New York. As your friend shows you around the city, she first of all directs you to places that are some of the must-see places to visit: the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, Times Square, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The hope is that when you leave from your visit to New York, you will have visited some of the popular landmarks. Although your friend offers to give you a tour of New York, this doesn’t mean that you will see everything that the city has to offer (since New York simply has too much to do and see during a short trip). You can’t see everything on a week trip to New York, but this trip will be an introduction to the city, from the perspective of someone who can guide you to some places of interest.

The book you hold in your hands is similar to this anecdote about a trip to New York. This book, for all practical purposes, is a brief tour through the subject of how one might integrate Christianity and psychology. It is just a guide. Just as there is too much to see in a brief tour of New York, the fields of psychology and Christian theology are too vast and wide within the field of integration to sum it all up in one book. However, we must begin somewhere. That being said, not all issues regarding integration are solved, but this book provides a basic framework for understanding how to begin to reflect and practice the integration of psychology and theology together, and to form your own views on the subject. Moreover, we believe this tour of integration will be helpful for empowering our next generation of integrative thinkers and practitioners. Integration, we argue, shouldn’t just be an abstract subject either. Thinking and reflecting on psychology and our Christian faith as a community from our particular cultural context will lead us into a transformative process where, over time, we are able to work toward greater love and justice.

That being said, while there are some personal parts of this tour, there is no single tour that can be completely removed from the person giving it. That’s where we, your authors (Carissa and William), come in. Throughout the book we’ll share some of our own experiences of integration, as well as how we think integration can be understood. Some of these views of integration are perspectives we bring to the table that you might have heard before, but others might be less familiar. However, if there’s anything to learn about integration right from the beginning, it is that you are an integral part of the integrative process, and you have something important to bring to the integration conversation. Truth be told, we are all on a journey of becoming more integrated as people, that is, understanding how our emotions, thoughts, faith in Christ, studies in psychology, cultural identity, and actions relate to each other. Our illustration of the tour demonstrates that there’s no single articulation of integration that can be separated from the person giving it, and a primary goal of this book is to help you learn more about how psychology and your Christian faith work and fit together from your particular cultural context.

Integration: The Basics

The term integration comes from the Latin root integer, which means whole or intact.1 We use the term integration since we are studying both psychology and Christian theology, and we are working to reflect on them in a unified way. The question that many of our students have is: How do we think about these subjects in a unified way? And how do we move forward in thinking and reflecting about psychology and Christianity together?

We argue in this book that no real conflict exists between psychology and the Christian faith and that both can contribute to a more complete picture of the world and human person. This does not mean that there is always complete symmetry on all topics relating to our Christian faith and psychology, but it does mean there are considerable areas of overlap, which we as Christians must consider.

In order to be straightforward with some of our assumptions about integration, here are some key components that will guide how we approach integration in this book: (1) Integrative reflection between psychology and the Christian faith is not simply an academic exercise, or something that can be reduced to the realm of thoughts or theories. It is embodied, lived, relational, and practical. (2) Embodied integrative reflection develops over time and is part of spiritual formation and transformation. (3) Integration is always influenced by the faith background, culture, studies in psychology, and life experiences we bring to the table. (4) Practicing integrative reflection between our culture, psychology, and the Christian faith cannot be divorced from the basic principles of loving God and others. (5) Embracing and understanding our cultural and ethnic background and the cultural/ethnic story of others is an essential element of interdisciplinary work between our Christian faith and psychology. (6) Practicing integration as Christians should lead us to expand our capacities to love God and others, and should enable us to work toward greater justice in our churches, communities, and wider society.

What is integration as we understand it? Integration is an embodied, lifelong practice of reflection and meaning-making that incorporates our Christian faith, psychology, and culture which leads to personal transformation such that we have a greater capacity to love God and others, and work toward greater love and justice in our churches, communities, and society.

One way we can approach this process is through intentional and thoughtful reflection as a community about our own Christian faith, psychology, and particular cultural context. We believe that the first step in this transformational process is the simple recognition that as Christians we already engage in reflecting on our faith. Or, to roughly paraphrase the great twentieth-century theologian, Karl Barth: “You are already a theologian!” (Barth, 1981). Many times, students believe that they don’t have anything to offer to the task of integration. However, as a Christian you have a basic belief in Christ, and this means you are already engaging in aspects of reflecting about your faith. Reflecting or thinking about our faith and asking how it applies to a real-life situation is the practice of theological reflection, and what theology is about. Reflecting on our faith from the particular situated context that we are embedded in (i.e., as psychology students or psychologists from our specific cultural location) is the very beginning of practicing integration for yourself.

If you are studying or interested in psychology, most likely, integration of psychology, your faith, and your culture is already occurring in your life without you even recognizing it. At first this might surprise you, but chances are you already have some beliefs or ideas about how psychology and your faith work together. Moreover, we always do this kind of reflection about psychology and our faith from our own embedded cultural context. While these beliefs and thoughts about psychology and our Christian faith might not be fully formed or articulated, they still represent some sort of beginning point for how you have already thought about psychology and Christianity. For instance, these are some common thoughts and questions we hear from our own students that represent integrative reflection on psychology, Christianity, and culture:

• “I think that counseling is about being loving toward others in a way that Jesus would.”

• “I believe that God created humans, and psychology helps me understand humans better.”

• “How should I understand mental illness? Is it just a diagnosis, or is something spiritual going on?”

• “In my culture, the spiritual support that people get from our church community is an important way of how my church understands well-being and thriving.”

All of these statements or questions reveal some beginning thoughts or questions regarding the disciplines of psychology and Christian theology. For instance, the first statement about loving others in the way that Jesus would relates counseling and Jesus’ concern for humanity, and demonstrates how a student’s faith commitment helps them understand a certain aspect of psychology, such as counseling or psychotherapy.

The second statement acknowledges that psychology is studying human thought and behavior while acknowledging that humanity is God’s creation (a very important point). This second statement also reveals a preliminary perspective on how psychology and Christianity should be understood together (that psychology studies humans who are ultimately created by...