Once in a great while I meet someone who might actually enjoy reading my dissertation. Those are great questions and they represent the biggest decision I had to make before I could frame a psychology text – especially one that would be useful to all Christians.
My goal was to compare and contrast “a” Christian worldview with modern psychology’s worldview. To do so, I defined “a” Christian worldview only in terms of those components where “The” Christian worldview and modern psychology’s assumptions and schools-of-thought intersect.
The areas I chose are God (naturalism vs Christian Theism),the Nature of Mankind, Epistemology, Morality, and the Causes of and Cures for Mental Pain and Suffering.
Contrasting a Christian worldview with modern psychology’s worldview along those few domains was easy and it allows teachers and parents to guide their students toward the specifics of their Christian worldview.
In my paradigm then, I do touch on total depravity (specifically the noetic effect of sin) in contrast to humanistic psychology’s perspective. I touch on free will in contrast to the determinism of Behaviorism and Freud. I contrast evolutionary naturalism, which explains all human psychology in terms of evolved natural processes, with a Creationist view that we were Created in God’s image (period). Election vs free will in terms of Salvation, old earth v new earth, perseverance, as you say, are very important issues, but I avoided them completely.
You can get a pretty good idea of my approach by reading the intro and 1st three chapters. I’ve put them on my web page to help people decide about the text. Take a look at
http://www.homeschoolpsych.com/files/Psychology_A_Christian_Perspective_look_inside_.pdf.
Thanks again for writing. Let me know what you think.
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