The Table Video

Psychologist Eric Johnson (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) comments on the role of prayer and meditation in Christian flourishing.

Transcript:

So, what I do is called Christian Psychology. What I think sometimes around here I hear it called Transformational Psychology, but whatever it’s called it’s one of the tasks of this agenda, is to develop distincly Christian models of therapy. Christianity is a therapeutic system, I think understood in a certain sense.

And in the last hundred years we’ve seen some phenomenal work done developing, rich and complex therapeutic systems. What remains for the church perhaps in this century, would be to take the rich discoveries of contemporary psychology, and kind of reassess or rethink, what are these resources that the Christian faith is all about. Two aspects of that, I think at least. One of those is called retrieval. We need to be reacquainted with our own resources, the therapeutic resources of the Christian faith.

Soul care has been going on for centuries, and it’s well understood I think from what I can see here at Biola. We need to become thoroughly aceturated with the, with our own tradition and how it is understood, the care of souls. But then also, we need to, to under, to be able to articulate this therapeutic framework, at the most sophisticated levels. Those that are comparable to the sorts of things that you, that we can read in modern psychotherapy.

And then, thirdly, we have to do research on this. We have to test our own theories and strategies and so on. Lot of this work has yet to be done, so in some sense this task is a very old task, it’s been around for centuries, but it’s also a very new task. I have some favorites, people that I like to read. One of the is Martin Luther. He suggested that there are three components to flourishing. Prayer is one of them, meditation is the second, and actually suffering is the third.

We heard a wonderful talk on suffering, so I won’t go over all he had to say about that, but let’s think for a little bit about the role of prayer, and the role of meditation in, what it means from a Christian standpoint to be flourishing. How, what, what is a Christian definition of flourishing? One way of thinking about that is communion with God.

Now, it’s more than that, because life involves more that just communion with God, even God said to Adam and Eve it’s not good, or he said to Adam it’s not good for you to be alone just with me, which, which means there’s more to human life, the way that he constituted it, than communion with God. But isn’t it the case that communion with God has to be in some way central, to what, our definition of flourishing is about.

And so, prayer probably is gonna be involved centrally. What is that look like and how are we to think of prayer? So many of us, so much of the time prayer is you know, asking God for things. And of course that’s an important part of that, but communion with God involves much more that that, right.

Opening up our souls to God, being real and honest with Him, inviting Him into our souls, listening to Him, having a dialogue, that is transformational, in the way that it rewires our brains, the way it reorient us in terms of what’s important, and what’s fulfilling and so on. Also, then, is, important is meditation. I think of them as prayer and meditation is kind of a dialectic of the, of our Christian lives.

We pray with God, we converse, we dialogue with Him, and from scripture we receive from God His understanding of the world and His values, and His thoughts, His loves. Meditation is a, became kind of a lost art over the last 100 years, 150 years. It’s very common practice of course before that. Research that’s been done on meditation suggests that it’s helpful for us to, to calm our bodies, and our souls.

And that we can do a kind of, a kind of deeper sort of work on our souls, if we’re, if we’re in a calmer meditative state. And so, one of the things that I do on my counseling, I think it’s one of the most important things, is to, to help my counselees to learn how to meditate. To learn how to engage in, in a meditative prayer with God. That takes practice, it takes time, but that involves then is calming down and then learning how to, to receive from God, His life, His understanding, His love. I also encourage the use of imagination in meditation.

So, when a person is in a meditative state, I would encourage them to picture spiritual trues. To picture a scriptural, trues that can be appropriated and taken more deeply, than just what Bible study might do, just understanding the text. So, for example, Roman Six talks about our union with Christ and how we are crucified with Him, and we’ve been raised from the dead, and so. I will commonly encourage my counselees to picture Jesus crucified on the cross.

And then, whatever they’re struggling with, perhaps a sin, perhaps some kind of suffering. Perhaps some shame or guilt that they’re burdened with. To, in their time with the Lord, and you know, in the early morning hours of what we call devotion time. But to do, to do what I would call soul work during that time and to picture Christ there bearing that, and they imagining God pulling that out of them, and getting nailed to the cross.

In that process people find some freedom, a transformation. We need to do research on that, we need to document the value of those sorts of things. But that’s the sort of thing that Christian psychology is very interested in. Thank you. [relaxing music]