Where o' Where....
Like I mentioned earlier, April left this morning for an interview at this horse farm. She called once. She hasn't come back yet. I miss her. I hope all is going well.
But onwards...Pastor Bob/The Eckardts gave April and I this Jay Adams book "Christian Living in the Home" as a wedding present. I've been reading it during my occasional smoke breaks and while I eat lunch/dinner. I'm a bit familiar with Jay Adam's work/nouthetic counseling in Reformed psychology/therapy. His central thesis is, I believe, that all emotional and psychological sickness is ultimately reduced to a sin that needs to be confessed.
Whether you and I agree with this supposition, the book thus far is really really good, and has been really helpful in my thinking about marriage. Now whether or not it will be helpful for my marriage in the days/weeks/years ahead, I've yet to see, but he says some great things about communication and honesty that I think are dead on. All that to say, thus far I really recommend the book.
Josiah Q. Roe | By Josiah Roe | 05:27 PM
Comments
FWIW, if Adams is right about that, then personally speaking, I have some fairly significant sins in my life which need immediate confession. That is obviously always true, but for some reason, it seems like mine must be far worse than the next guy, as I don't get the sense most normal people are as screwed up as me.
Posted by: scott cunningham at July 1, 2003 09:23 PM
Now, I don't know you personally Scott, but I do know that times I felt like that, usually stemmed from the usual arrogance that's associated with "self-awareness." Or at least, we've got a good "healthy" sense of how corrupt we are, or how corrupt we could so easily be without the grace of God. Like, going all Nero or something.
Posted by: JosiahQ at July 1, 2003 10:10 PM
If he's asserting that depression is necessarily due to some unconfessed sin, I will have to disagree with him. Does he not see the brain as having the ability to be "sick" like any other part of the body? Or would he say any sickness in the body is a direct result of unconfessed sin? An account in the gospels would refute that claim, wouldn't it?
Posted by: John at July 1, 2003 11:10 PM
While I have little personal knowledge of the things Adams is saying, from what I've heard the basic idea is that treating emotional problems as a disease is not the most helpful way of going about it. The brain can certainly be "sick", but now we're talking malignancy, aneurism, trauma, etc., which isn't what most people have in mind. On a personal level, anything that makes one's behavior not one's responsibility really bothers me. And much of current psychological blather does exactly that: "It's not your fault you're depressed, you've got a chemical imbalance." Yeah, whatever. From what I've heard, almost no one diagnosed with such an "imbalance" in the brain is given any kind of actual physical diagnosis, let alone the kind of blood work that could actually detect such a thing.
I think that in many - not all, but many - cases where antidepressants or other behaviour-modification drugs are proscribed, the end result is an abdication of responsibility for one's own actions and attitudes. In this way, viewing emotional problems as being symptomatic of underlying sin patterns isn't such a bad way of looking at it.
Posted by: ryan at July 2, 2003 10:23 AM
It's a plague... of stupid people (bots?) leaving comments that contain links to porn sites.
Posted by: rob at January 9, 2004 10:55 AM
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