Revival: Psychology and Religious Truth (1942)

Thomas Hywel Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351346498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

An attempt is made in this book to open a new line of thought in theology with the aid of Psychology. The author strives to throw light on the basic truths of religion from a new angle and to adopt a different attitude to that usually taken by theologians.

He believes that there is still more light which psychology can throw regarding these truths, but its findings are not yet adequate nor sufficiently clear for this. Here the lectures cover the bearing of psychology on - The Origin of Religion; The Idea of God: Religious Life; Religious Truth and Belief; The Trinity; The Person of Christ; The Atonement; and The Future Life.

LECTURE 7
PSYCHOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF SIN AND ATONEMENT

PROBABLY modern psychology can give us greater illumination on the doctrine of the Atonement than on any other Christian truth. In this chapter we are to consider what this illumination is, but in order to set it in the right perspective, we must examine what light psychology can give us on the doctrine of sin.

Here we note two outstanding facts. In the first place modern psychology, notably in the case of Freud, has revived the conception of original sin, and even afforded some support to the idea of total depravity. To Freud the root of almost all the ills that flesh is heir to is what he calls “the Pleasure Principle.” This is deeply embedded in the very stuff of human nature, it shows itself mainly as sexual pleasure, but it affects the whole lump of humanity, in every aspect of psychic and physical life. Like sin, it is not a physical matter although it affects the physical side of human nature, it is essentially psychic, having to do with the basic elements of moral and spiritual life. Like sin also, it ends in death and because of it there is present in humanity a “Death Principle” that in the end will claim all things and all men. There is thus, at the heart of all Freud’s teaching a strain of hopeless pessimism, and for him there is no escape from the inevitable and necessary doom of death.

It will be noted how this view resembles certain aspects of New Testament teaching on sin. Thus we find St. James saying: “When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”* St. Paul often speaks of men being “dead in trespesses and sins,” telling us also that “the wages of sin is death.”† It must be said, however, that these resemblances are more apparent than real, for there are profound differences. The most important of these differences is that in Christianity, whilst there is a deep and grave emphasis on sin and the death that it entails, there is on the other hand a noble optimism and a certainty of victory over sin. The entail has been broken in Jesus Christ, and through Him we can conquer it also. There is a way for man to rise out of sin into newness of life. Sin and death have been subdued, a new way has been opened whereby men may enter into victorious and unending life.

There are other differences, but we need not dwell upon them all. It will be sufficient to mention one more. To Freud the death to which the “Pleasure Principle” tends is in the future and is inevitable. In Christianity, it would appear that the main emphasis is on the death that sin works now in the spiritual and moral elements of man’s being. Whilst not losing sight of the end of sin in death, it deals more with the present reality, the spiritual degeneration and the loss of spiritual life and power wrought by sin in the personality of the sinner. It would be wrong to say that this is always the attitude of the New Testament writers—for it is not so—but it may be said that this emphasis on the effect of sin here and now is very deep in the minds of most writers. We shall deal with this aspect later.

The second outstanding fact is the distinction which modern psychology has made between sin and moral disease. Here psychology has made it easier to understand and to deal with certain weaknesses that presented difficulties to all who have to do with the moral and spiritual aspects of men’s lives. There is, however, a danger that by some psychologists all sin may be regarded as moral disease, and they tend to ignore the fact that what may now be a moral disease is due to previous sinning, until the habit of evil has become too strong and the will has lost its power. The will-less, abject victim of drink, who presents a sad picture of what may be described as moral disease, has come to this state through frequent and continual dissipation and so cannot be absolved of all responsibility for his condition. We may note two points of difference between sin and moral disease.

First, sin is always a matter of the will, whereas, moral disease may arise from some physical cause, or from some psychic shock. For instance, kleptomania is almost always due to some psychic twist brought about by an unpleasant and forgotten psychic experience. Certain sexual aberrations may be due to the repression of some shock, some painful experience, that has been driven into the unconscious. These cannot be treated as sins.

For, and this is the second point to note, there can be no responsibility for these, if they are due to forces in the past over which the person had no control, whereas sin always implies personal responsibility and so brings guilt. Some factors may make it easy for men to sin, such as heredity, environment, especially the personalities that form the moral and spiritual environment. These may weigh the balances very heavily against men in their fight for goodness, truth and purity. But the individual only becomes sinful, only incurs guilt, when the will goes forth and identifies itself with wrong doing. No psychology, no method of psychoanalysis can absolve the sinner of the guilt of his sin. It needs the love of God in its omnipotence to rescue and keep men from sin, and it calls for the forgiveness of the eternal made possible through sacrifice to remove the guilt of sin from the soul of man. It is becoming clear to psychologists that the victim of moral disease feels differently regarding this weakness from what the sinner feels regarding his sin. There is more conscience in the one than in the other, and guilt is the wound caused by sin to the moral self and the spiritual person, the pain of the outraged personality. In moral disease, the feeling appears to be one more of shame or frustration, of disgrace and disability rather than of guilt, and it is safe to say that in his inmost soul every man knows whether in his case it is moral disease or sin that has to be accounted for and removed. It may well be, probably it is so, that the method of deep analysis, as it is getting now to be called, can do much to bring relief in cases of moral disease, it certainly is not able to do so in cases of deliberate sin. Sins of ignorance are in a somewhat different category as are also certain acts done unintentionally or with a motive that may be regarded as good.

It will now be clear that from a psychological point of view, we have to make a distinction between sin and the consciousness of sin, between the act of sinning and the consciousness that the act is sinful and so incurs guilt. We know that sin may be committed without the consciousness that it is sinful. For instance, little children may, and often do, commit acts which are sinful without any sense of their being wrong. They will steal, be cruel, deceive and lie, apparently without any compunction. These are in reality sinful acts, and if persisted in they produce evil habits that result in grevious sins in later life. We cannot, however, regard the children as responsible or as guilty of sin unless they are conscious of them as sinful, yet the acts are really sinful. When the moral sense, awakes and develops, this is often due to the rebukes administered or punishments inflicted by the persons who have the care of the children, on the one hand, or to their example on the other hand. Probably the realization in the child-mind that such acts cause pain to the mother or to friends, is the most potent factor in quickening the dormant moral sense. Once awake, however, the child has become conscious of sin, and we must admit that this is a higher moral and spiritual state than the non-moral state of childish innocence.

The Biblical doctrine of the fall has been assailed from many sides in recent days. One of the most effective criticisms has come from the side of the evolutionary view of sin. This view maintains that what is spoken of as a “fall” is in reality a rise—a step upward in the growth of moral life and the dawning of moral sense in the soul. There is great truth in this idea, but it is not all the truth. If, as we have suggested, it is possible to sin without being conscious of it as sin, then something has preceded and always does precede the step upward when the moral sense is stirred to wakefulness. Evils that may fetter the soul as habits may have begun their baneful influence, before the sense of their evil nature is born. Now sin is always a fall, evil is always a step downward whether it is known as evil or not. When it is recognised as evil, that is assuredly a step upward, but this has been preceded by a “fall.” So the fall in Genesis is the disobedience of the divine command, the knowledge of good and evil comes afterwards and may be regarded as in a sense a rise. But the effect of the disobedience remains as is clear from the fact that, from henceforth, the tree of life is guarded and prohibited.

It is not only in children, however, that we discover sin without recognizing it as sin. The spirit or outlook of one’s group or society may produce the same effect. Group law or gang practices may exalt and extol certain sinful acts and make them seem honourable and praiseworthy, and so the members of the gang may grow to regard them as good instead of evil. In this way these evil practices may be carried out without any sense of their sinfulness, but rather with pride and self-glorification. This is what makes the appeal and power of the leader of the gang. It may go some way in explaining the double standard of morality in many men, one for private life and another for business. It must be noted also that frequent sinning blunts the edge of the moral sense, so that actions that were at first performed with an accompanying sense of guilt and shame come at last to be done without a pang and with little or no sense of wrong. This is one of the punishments of sin, it robs the moral consciousness of its sensitiveness, it distorts man’s sense of values and demoralizes his spiritual outlook. St. Paul speaks of this as “a conscience seared as with a hot iron,” that is, its sensitiveness is impaired.

In this way the more a man sins, the less he feels his sin, the greater his guilt, the less sensitive he is to it, and something is needed to quicken the conscience again, something akin to what Jesus told Nichodemus. “You must be born from above.” This loss of sensitiveness is one aspect of the “death” which sin brings and it goes on from the moment the sin is committed. The future “death” is but the fuller working out and the completion of this slow dying that sin produces.

There is, however, another side to this question, for it is possible to have a sense of sin without having committed the sin. Thus, it is well known that girls at the adolescent stage often feel as if they had committed grevious sin. Psychologists, however—McDougall and others—who have examined many cases of such sinful consciousness, have come to the conclusion that it is due to the quickening of the moral sense that takes place in adolescence together with the presence of strong temptation, but that in the great majority of cases there is no actual sin. This may go a little way to explain another fact well known to psychologists, that men may imagine themselves to have committed far more grevious sins than they actually have done. John Bunyan, for instance, thought he had committed the unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost, but a careful examination of his life reveals that his sin was swearing and playing “cat” on the Sunday. Add to the sense of guilt and shame induced by these practices, the presence of intense temptation, and we can probably account for his abnormal estimate of himself and his sin. We know from his own confession that he was strongly tempted to give up Christ and go the way of sin.

It is clear thus that other considerations besides the individual’s consciousness of sin, have to be taken into account in our estimate of sin. In reality it has to be judged on the background of the great moral and spiritual realities of the universe, in a word, in the light of God, and man’s relation to Him. Sin has been regarded as the breach of the moral law, and there is sanction for this usage in the New Testament, for there it is said that “sin is lawlessness”;* living without law and without reason. This is a real element in all sinning, but this view fails to reach the deeper factors in the problem.

Again, sin has been treated as failure to live up to the ideal, the choice of a lower instead of the highest good. This view also has some support in scripture, for in the Old Testament one of the chief terms for sin is “transgression,” which means “missing the mark” or failing to reach the goal.† But although this aspect is also present in all sin, it does not exhaust the deepest meaning of sin. Some other views of sin may be mentioned. In accordance with the Greek intellectualist view that virtue is knowledge, the conception of sin as ignorance gained a place in the philosophy of the ancient world and it has retained a place in the thought of many men in these days. It cannot, however, be accepted as an adequate view, for it is well-known, especially by the sinner himself, that sin goes more deeply into personality than into the mind. It involves all the moral and spiritual aspects of man’s being, affecting the will and the affections as well as the mind.

Another view is that which regards sin as a privation, or as the absence of good. Just as darkness is the absence of light, so evil is the absence of good, the negation of virtue. This view is often found in mystic circles; it has a place in Plotinus and in some aspects of the thought of St. Augustine, and it may be said to be the prevailing view in the mystical philosophy of the East. It is only possible to hold such a view by denying or ignoring a wide range of facts regarding sin. It is clear that sin can never be regarded as mere negation, or privation, for it becomes a positive power in the soul, a force that fetters and enslaves the spirit of man. St. Paul’s view of it as something “that has dominion over us,” is nearer the truth of the situation than the merely privative view.

The evolutionary view of sin makes it a necessary stage in the upward progress of man towards morality and civilized life. With regard to all these views, and there are elements of truth in them all, we may say that they are inadequate at two basic points. They do not give adequate consideration to the spiritual aspects of sin, and they fail to keep the question in the realm of personal relationships. In the ultimate sin is a breach in the relations of personal spirits, and it is probably true that only in Christianity do we get a satisfactory view of its nature. There sin is viewed on the background of the Fatherhood of God and the Sonship of Man. It is thus an outrage on love, the slighting of a Father’s affection, disloyalty to the claims of parental love and filial duty, a breach of friendly relations between father and sons. In the final issue, sin as always against God and the Psalmists confession “Against Thee only have I sinned”* is quite true, even when he has sinned against his fellow men. If this is the real nature and meaning of sin—a disharmony and estrangement between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man, we can see what the Atonement must be and must do. Whatever else it may be, it must restore harmony and reconcile the two parties.

Now what has psychology to say of this? We may say that the deeper knowledge of personality and of the spiritual and ethical realities in personality, such as conscience and the fact of moral consciousness, given us by more recent psychology, help us to see more clearly the deeper meaning of the Cross, as well as helping us to see the weaknesses of some of the older theories. If I can lead your minds and hearts into the secret of that transcendent sacrifice I shall have done something for you. Only I want to say again, that the atonement is not something to be understood only; it is something to be experienced. Only he understands a little of it who passes under the shadow of the cross, and to find its secret we have to be crucified with Christ. We can never fully understand this greatest act of God in redemption. Mystery must always surround the cross and its sacrifice, and our only fitting attitude must be that of reverent acceptance of the fact of mystery. It is probable also that no final theory of the atonement is possible since the fact is producing new and ever-enlarging experiences in the souls of men. What I have to say then must not be taken as final, but rather as tentative and exploratory. It is, however, clear that the deeper knowledge of personality and of personal relationships helps us to approach the atonement from a different angle, and with what seems to me a more adequate understanding.

Let me try then and gather together what suggestions we can make, from the psychological point of view, on this central fact of our Christian faith.

(1) Here is the first thing. I cannot help feeling that the old line of approach to the atonement was, from the psychological standpoint, a mistaken one. If we are to judge by the bulk of the preaching of the last fifty years, and by many of the books written during that period, the line of approach has been to try and stir pity or fear, or at least indignation. The constant appeal to the sufferings of Christ and the display of His physical distress and weakness, together with the pictures of His suffering the penalty due to the sins of the world; these were I feel a mistake. It was psychologically wrong and it was basically wrong. Just think ! of trying to stir pity for God in His profoundest and most characteristic act of sacrifice, the fullest and richest expression of His nature in the love surrender of Himself. Imagine ! the incongruity and the fallacy of trying to create fear or indignation in the hearts of men by this closest and most real approach of divine love to sinful humanity. The only approach fitting to the fact and the occasion is the love approach, the approach of praise and gratitude. If an apostle can speak of the cross as meaning to Christ the joy that was set before Him, can we not also imagine the supreme joy of God in giving Himself to the uttermost, the deep satisfaction, yea the deepest satisfaction that even God could experience, if we are to judge from our own deepest life, in His act of surrender to and bearing the burden of others? No; the approach must not be an appeal to pity, much less must it be to fear or indignation. It must win kindly love, awaken gratitude and compel men by its very majesty and by the wonder of its divine energy. It is the act in which God most fully expresses himself and most deeply reveals the secret of His inmost being. It is not a thing to be feared but to be loved and adored, a self-oblation to which we can and must yield ourselves.

I have been reading lately Principal Wheeler Robinson’s fine little book on Suffering Human and Divine, and I am glad ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction
• Lecture I. Psychology and the Origin of Religion.
• Lecture II. Psychology and the Ground of Religion (or Psychology and God).
• Lecture III. Psychology and Religious Life.
• Lecture IV. Psychology and Religious Truth.
• Lecture V. Psychology and the doctrine of the Trinity.
• Lecture VI. Psychology and Christology.
• Lecture VII. Psychology and the doctrine of Sin and Atonement.
• Lecture VIII. Psychology and the doctrine of the Future Life.