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This page revised and Copyrighted: Theon Doxazo |
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03.1.7 |
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Visualize, if you will, a man sitting in church on Sunday morning. The minister is preaching on love. In the midst of the sermon the man stands up and stops the service. He says: “I don't love my enemy, I can't stand my neighbor, and I don't know if I even love my wife. So, preacher, how do I learn to love?”
The usual solution is to counsel the parishioner to 'go to church, read the Bible, and pray.' Yet, this is essentially the same counsel given to almost any spiritual problem brought to light. In the movie Mr. Roberts the doctor on the ship gave the same treatment to the seamen regardless of their complaint. “Broken leg? Two aspirin. Report for duty.” This scene is funny because we know that medical science doesn't work this way. Instead, diagnosis of the particular problem is made and a unique treatment specific to that disorder is provided. The treatment for plague is different from the treatment for stroke. Christian Psychologists need to become as skilled when dealing with spiritual issues.
Currently Christians provide spiritual interventions with little or no understanding of the problems their clients face. Our Christian bookstores are burdened with books on 'Christian Counseling', yet we have almost nothing on normal Christian Spiritual Development. We have even less on Spiritual Pathology. One must first understand at least something of Normal Spiritual Development before one can identify any Pathological departures from that normality. One must first have a reasonably clear understanding of various Spiritual Pathologies before specifying treatments for these pathologies via a specific approach to Christian Counseling. One must know what is wrong before a treatment can be tailored to intervene in it.
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