The Table Video

Psychology bridges the deep disconnect between the profoundly meaningful ideal of loving our neighbors as ourselves and the reality that we human beings often do not love our neighbors, and sometimes not ourselves, or at least not in the right way. Psychological research and theological insights can shed light on some psychological factors facilitating love and on some psychological factors that impede love; value-laden psychologists are part of the problem but can also be part of the solution. I will address some ways in which a suitably expanded and applied psychology can contribute to our task of provoking one another to love.

Transcript:

Thank you, Tom Ward began us yesterday morning with a bit of autobiography, so I’m gonna close with a bit more autobiography. In high school I was drawn, in my growing faith, to a place where I was willing to follow God’s will, not my own. So I began searching for what God’s will was. And then at the age of 16 I went to my Lutheran Bible camp, deep in the mountains of southern Montana, I felt deeply loved in that camp, and I got a clear answer.

God’s will was that I love my neighbor. Sitting on the bank of the East Fork of the Boulder River I wrote that I now knew what I should do with my life, I should study psychology because in order to love people, I needed to understand them. My logic wasn’t particularly good. There’s all kinds of things you can learn to love people. But here I am 45 years later talking about how psychology can help us love.

So, I wanna address some psychological meanings of love, especially the challenge of increasing love, or in the word of Hebrews 10:24 provoking one another to meaningful love. More specifically, I want to address some ways in which the psychology of love can help us in that task. In order to love you by staying within the time allotted my presentation, I’m gonna read my talk which I wrote to be read. So, let me start with an example of love at it’s best. Jenny, a grandmother, loves her grandchildren.

Alternately, warm… those grandchildren and rebukes them when they do something she thinks is wrong. She expects the best from them, opposing mere goodness when excellence is within their grasp. Yet, she unquestioningly embraces them when they’re in need, when they admit they’ve done something wrong, whey then suffer. So, the first point I wanna make is that there are psychological dimensions to Jenny’s love for her grandchildren. Her love involves actions, thoughts, emotions, motivations, intentions and relationships.

Accordingly, part of the meaning of love is psychological. Let’s look at how this connects with a couple of the definitions of love, a couple of definitions. So here’s Tom’s definition of love, it includes actions, thoughts, sympathy, empathy, intentions and relationships, all psychological. Steve Post, Stephen Posts thinking has been evolving, as we saw, so I picked an older definition of the essence of love is to effectively affirm and to gratefully delight in the wellbeing of others. That includes actions and thoughts, and it emphasizes emotions, to a greater extent.

While the standard way that psychologists address questions is through psychological research, most in the field strive to conduct scientific research in a way that’s value free and objective, as subjective as possible. And here objective has to do, not with what Bennett Helm was talking about yesterday, but quantifying observations and investigating facts in a non-subjective value free way. In doing so, I think psychologists sometimes miss something that’s crucial. If love has a psychological demotion, component, love also has an ineradicably ethical dimension as we saw in Tom’s and Stephen’s definition.

Love aims to promote the wellbeing of others, and to take into account some key concepts raised by Nick Wolterstorff, love aims to quote, promote the good and to treat others as befits their worth. Now, those are ethical terms, values that cannot be derived from the facts of science. Evaluations that cannot be derived from psychologies descriptions. Love, I would suggest, does not fall neatly within disciplinary compartments.

It spans and transcends the methods employed by scientists, theologians, philosophers and ethicists. So it’s a perfect CCT topic, a good interdisciplinary topic. We need the contributions of each to produce a comprehensive understanding of love to grasp the full meaning of love. Love is a purplish reality, a psychological ethical concept. If we strive to understand love by attempting to exclude the ethical, to expunge what is good and worthwhile, what contributes to persons wellbeing, which is what psychologists tend to do when doing empirical research, we end up with an impoverished understanding of love.

To be sure, we’ll learn something that is sort of love like. The scientific method can be used validly and is often very helpful, however, understanding the blue of love is not the same as understanding the purple of love. Something important, something crucial, is left out when we limit our attention to the blue of love. We need to draw on both scientific and ethical theological understandings to get at the purple, at the psychological ethical reality of love.

Although the devil is in the details, the failure to recognize that love is a mixed psychological ethical concept produces several pitfalls in psychologists usual approaches to understanding love. So, I have a critical appreciative approach to psychology. So, some psychologists believe that because science produces some knowledge about love it is the only source of knowledge about love.

Psychologists who investigate love often draw on implicit ethical assumptions, they smuggle them in, to their definition and measurement of love, although claiming that their investigations are objective and value free. Scientific investigations of love often omit significant ethical dimensions of the meaning of love, such as furthering the wellbeing of others and recognizing goodness and worth. Psychological scientists, based on strictly scientific investigations, sometimes draw ethical conclusions from facts claiming scientific authority for the ethical conclusions they draw.

A recent example, Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene claims, on the basis of evolutionary psychology in his extensive study of hypothetical situations involving trolleys, plus reason stripped of it’s problematic emotional biases, he claims to know the answer to the moral problem of cooperation among different cultural groups, which he dubs moral tribes. The solution, utilitarianism. An ethical theory that focuses on maximizing happiness across all people. That is, he derives an ought from a scientific is.

Suffice it to say, I think that we should reject those approaches to science and the ethical dimensions of love. Another choice to be made is between striving to examine exemplars of love, on good love, versus focusing on loves failures. I think we need to both. We need to build up our ability to love, we also need to diminish behaviors, patterns, thoughts and emotions that lead to failures of love.

One reason for this, is the reality to which Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good from evil passes, not through states, not between classes, not between political parties either, but right through all human hearts. To study love in our own hearts and in the hearts of others, we thus need to study the best and the worst. So, let me delineate five varieties of failure to love. I’m really drawn to call them pathologies of love, but I think that’s way too medical, I’ve been teaching abnormal psychology too long. So, not pathologies of love. Malformations is a good term.

These categories, I promise, are not definitive, empirically supported or complete. And the many individual differences within each category is substantial and important. So first, sometimes we simply don’t have the capacity to love enough, or long enough, or deep enough. Our love is insufficient. At other times our love may start out well, but then it takes a negative turn. We may begin with the best of intentions of helping our children come up with their own creative project, but at some point our helping them turns into our controlling them. Our being paternalistic. Our love for others can also be, or become, disrespectful.

We’re at particular risk of disrespectful love when we try to help the poor, the disabled, those who are different from us. We genuinely want to help, but somewhere along the line we convey our deep seated, and not necessarily conscious, belief that we are, well, superior to those we are helping. I think of a colleague who said she would never ever send her kids to a local high school with a largely non-white student body.

She would condescend to go and help the kids in that district, but the message that she did not respect what occurred in those schools, the children in those schools, the teachers in those schools, and the parents who sent their kids to those schools was unmistakable. Cultural insensitivity can produce love that is tinged with disrespect. Finally, Nick Wolterstorff has written compellingly about the malformed love that produces injustice, arguing instead for justice that’s embedded in… When love is properly understood.

Third, we can mishandle love when we’re in relationship with people who make mistakes. How do we respond to a friend who is routinely cruel to his insecure son because the cruelty comes with friend, our friend is drunk, which occurs routinely. In trying to love our friend, we can make a variety of mistakes. We may think that love requires condemning our friend, or at least his behavior, that is we can practice condemning love, communicating hate for the sinner along with hate for the sin. This is one way to mishandle love.

Increasingly, however, I hear Christians arguing it’s impossible to hate the sin and love the sinner, that all criticism, all confrontation, all judgment, all attempts at moral correction are wrong or unloving because in criticizing the behavior we criticize the person which harms the person. And love for others means accepting them the way they are. I don’t think that’s a good solution. I can’t imagine Jesus saying he accepts those who willingly and unrepentantly harm others in order to benefit themselves, that Jesus accepts those who consistently act unjustly. Forgive, yes.

Does Jesus come to us where we are? Yes, love always. But would Jesus accept sinful behavior, accept sin? I think not. To the woman caught in adultery he didn’t say, I accept you the way you are, he said go and sin no more. Condoning love, condoning the misdeeds of another is thus, also not the solution. Now I should add that I think the phrase accepting someone is really ambiguous and used in several different sentences. Clarity about it’s meaning may dissolve my disagreement with those whose views I’m challenging here. Enabling love is also problematic. We may try to love our friend by intervening with his boss so he doesn’t get fired for getting drunk on the job.

Unfortunately, the effect of our love is that his problem is perpetuated because he doesn’t experience the negative consequences of his problematic behavior. Tough love of the right sort is often proposed as the ideal here. Upholding standards while conveying unmistakably clear love for the person who errs. This is very difficult to do well, requiring great wisdom, humility, and a willingness to remove the log in our own eye before commenting on a friends speck.

But I can tell you clearly, I want friends who tell me when I screw up. If I make a bad argument, I want you to challenge me. I want friends who don’t accept me the way I am, but who help me become a better person, a more Christlike person, I want care confrontation. A fourth way in which love often goes astray is self love getting out of balance with love for others. We can love ourselves too much, too little, or in the wrong ways. We may start out loving our children intending to promote their wellbeing through athletic or theater performance.

Somewhere along the line, however, what counts about the child’s performance becomes more about our reputation and accomplishments than about what’s in the best interests of our child. Love for another devolves into love for self. Finally, a fifth type of loving poorly has to do with our failure to love the unlovable, that is, those who are difficult to love. It’s hard to love people who are obnoxiously self centered, like a guy who cuts us off on the freeway and screams at the adults in charge of his sons tee ball games.

It is, of course, more difficult to love our enemies. And we often fail to love those who don’t even, we don’t even notice. Out of sight, out of mind, out of love. In all those cases of our malformed or inadequate love, psychological factors are at work producing insufficient love or twisting love in some way. A standard approach to understanding such human behavior and changing it in desirable ways is to first, carefully delineate the behavior when wants to decrease or increase determine what motivates people to behave in that way, and then change peoples motivation so they behave in the desired way.

In a statement that they appear, at first, to contrast sharply with that standard psychological approach, Nick asserts, quote, Jesus says nothing about reasons or motives for loving the neighbor, all he says is that one should love ones neighbor as oneself. He nowhere rejects caring about some people because one is attached to them, caring about others because one feels compassion for them, caring about yet others, because one finds oneself attracted to them and so forth, end quote.

So, how do I put this? Motivation may not have mattered to Jesus, it may not matter to some philosophers, but psychologists care a lot about motivation. [laughter] Motivation matters, we think. If we can bring about the right motivation, we can succeed in provoking people to love. A stereotype of myself and my profession from another perspective, a better perspective, I think the apparent conflict is not a real conflict.

I’m interpreting Wolterstorff’s reading of Jesus to mean there are multiple motivations that may lead someone to act in a loving fashion. Jenny may love her grandchildren because she’s attached to them and their parents. A stranger may exhibit love to one of these children after an accident because he or she has compassion for the child. Still, another person may exhibit loving behaviors to those children because they like kids, they’re attracted to them. Three different motivations can produce the desired response, love for those children.

A term used in abnormal psychology, equifinality, is relevant here. The term refers to many routes to the same destination. Many causal pathways that may produce the same set of psychological symptoms. One persons depression may stem from a tragedy, another from social rejection, and a third from a genetic predisposition plus moderate stress. Three different causes producing the same psychological problem.

Likewise, when we aim to provoke one another to love, I think it would be a mistake to focus on identifying only one underlying motivation, one causal factor. Rather, we should be open to a variety of psychological factors being at play in different circumstances in producing love or failing to produce love. So, I wanna address one more issue before exploring some specific psychological factors associated with love. A specification of the kind of psychology to be used. The standard approach to psychology holds that psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

I define the field more broadly as psychological studies, disciplined inquiry including, both focused, for instance scientific and comprehensive inquiries, and employing a broad range of methods aimed at understanding and explaining the psychological dimensions of human persons. David Myers and I both draw on science, though he argues science should be based solely on science. My broader definition makes room, as well, for contributions to psychological studies from theology, philosophy, ethics, literature, film, art and more.

We can and should, I contend, draw on psychological knowledge wherever we find it. What are psychological dimensions of, I referred to. So here’s a list. I’m not gonna read them all. Note that some topics, those in red, like free will and personhood, understand theologically or philosophically, are not really addressed in scientific psychology because they can’t be handled adequately by the scientific method. They are, however, relevant to the psychology of love, or so I claim.

Unfortunately, Christian psychologists and theologians addressing psychological topics have devoted relatively little attention to understanding love and increasing love. Less than one percent of the titles of articles in the two flagship journals of the Psychology and Theology Integration Movement, Journal of Psychology and Theology and the Journal of Psychology and Christianity have love in their titles, that excludes sexual and romantic love. I hope that changes. The editors are not to blame. Half of those articles are in special issues that they asked me, the two editors asked me to put together.

And both of those editors are at Biola by the way. Well, to summarize, to understand, I contend we need to look at loving examples, exemplars and failures to love, we need to look at relevant scientific, ethical and theological understandings, and we need to address a wide range of psychological topics. Consistent with the idea of equifinality, psychological researchers have investigated a wide range of psychological processes contributing to love. I will focus on seven, an incomplete list whittled down from my previous 20, but seven will permit us to conclude the conference on time. I directly address neither biological factors nor cultural factors and quite a few other important things.

Those are important so we’ll have to address them at the next conference on the meaning of love. So, each of the seven factors I will address may be important in producing love or in reducing malformed love. First, if we have the right thoughts, love will follow. I’m an enthusiastic supporter of clear thinking and careful formulation of ideas, beliefs matter. For instance, those who believe it right to hate their enemies are unlikely to love them. However, our behavior doesn’t always follow from our beliefs.

Accordingly, to right belief is often added a choice to follow a particular ethical belief such as a commitment or a choice to love. In the four step model proposed by Aristotle, we need to engage in ethical reflection, and then in a subsequent step, to decide to do what is moral. This focus on choice faces a couple of challenges. First, most scientific psychologists don’t believe we human beings have choices, in the robust sense of human agency of our having the capacity to choose to do something other than what we, in fact, do. This is in sharp contrast to most ethicists and our legal system, which claim that we can make choices and may thus be held morally and legally responsible for our actions.

Different criticism, theological, has to do with our slavery to sin. Hence, Paul’s famous I do not understand my own actions for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. The criticisms of psychologists and theologians merge in this, we are far less free than we imagine we are. Turning from rational and unconscious sources of love, other psychologists find the roots of our love, not in our thoughts, but in our emotions and intuitions. Indeed, there is compelling evidence that we’re more generous to others when in a good mood than when in a bad mood. It’s known as the feel good, do good phenomena

Feelings play a central role in one influential societal message, we are told to trust our gut and to follow our heart. The latter ideal is a recurrent theme in Disney movies. [“Follow Your Heart”] [laughter] I can’t remember where this started. Okay. So, that’s the popular version. So, people give us bad rules, we need to throw the rules out and trust our hearts. Shows over and over again. There’s more of a research based emphasis on important of intuition and emotions found in the work of Jonathan Haidt.

Now, the usual assumption is that, reason is primary in making decisions. So, here we have the eliciting situation. The primary causal pathway is the dark line. So, situation occurs, we think about it, and that leads to our judgment. And affect emotions kind of off to the side. What Haidt claims, I goofed, just focus on the top part here, you have an eliciting situation that leads to our intuition, which is very tied to emotion, and then we make a judgment. So, emotions shape our judgment.

And then what’s reasoning’s role? It’s, think of a post-hoc rationalization from what we already decided. That there are some other ways that he accounts for what we do that’s a little more complicated, that’s the social part. But, Haidt doesn’t actually stop at describing this phenomena, he really seems to think that Hume got it right in focusing on intuitions and emotions as central to optimal ethical theory. So Haidt, that is, is another instance of a psychological scientist moving from scientific facts to espousing a moral theory.

Now, we don’t have to buy into Haidt’s entire intellectual agenda to recognize that he’s onto something very important though. Our emotions play a significant role in what we actually do, including whether or not we act in a loving manner. If we wanna love and provoke others to love, we need to recognize the emotional, intuitive and unconscious forces that push us to love in some situations, and in other situations to refrain from loving. For instance, it’s hard to love when feeling really scared or really angry. It’s much easier to love when we feel loved. Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on the ethical theories of psychologists regarding moral emotions, there’s a growing body of philosophical and theological literature on moral emotions. Biblical criticism of the idea of trusting ones heart isn’t too hard to find. So, the heart, should we trust the heart? The heart is devious, it is perverse.

A different perspective on the heart and emotions. Or from my own current Episcopal tradition, from right one morning prayer, we have followed, this part of the confession, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. The fourth psychological factor, social psychologists have emphasized how social context influence whether or not we act in loving ways. Much of this research has to do with whether or not we help strangers. A line of research sparked by the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese. Her repeated screams were heard by dozens of bystanders who neither acted to protect her nor even call the police.

Or so the standard story goes. Several factors have emerged from the extensive research on the bystander effect. First, the more people who know about a problem the less likely it is that a particular individual will help. Kitty Genovese’s neighbors believed that, surely someone else would call the police but they didn’t. Second, if it’s not clear who’s responsible for helping, for loving a person, love is less likely.

Several other factors have to be present before person A helps person B. Imagine someone is lying, injured and lying on the ground on your route from point A to point B. Are we gonna help or not? Several factors have to be present. First, we have to notice the person. If we are totally focused on our cellphone, we may walk right by the person and never notice them, we’re not gonna help them. Second, do we interpret it as an emergency or not? If the person is, kinda, right next to the, a shopping cart filled with personal belongings we may conclude, ah that person’s homeless they don’t need our help. And then finally, we need to take responsibility. If we do we’ll show love, if we don’t we won’t.

Another factor, I was critical of Joshua Greene’s book on moral tribes, but the concept of moral tribes is a critically important one. We have a powerful tendency, as a species, to divide the world into us versus them. We’ll help those in our group, but not people from other tribes. Indeed, we may even build walls to keep them out precluding the expression of love. Both Old and New Testaments urge us to resist this tendency.

Leviticus 19:34 is pretty explicit, the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native born, love them as yourself. And the New Testament includes even more challenging to love our enemy. Fifth point, many psychologists are deeply skeptical of a claim that anyone loves other people unless substantially motivated by self interest. They would say this, sure Jenny loves her grandkids, that’s easy, they love her back.

Like most grandparents she gets more than she gives. Plus, she gets to leave them with their parents at night. But would she love them so well if they weren’t related to her, and she didn’t get anything back from them? No way. It may look good, but Jenny’s love is actually a selfish love. Now, Larry Batson’s carried out a sustained and ingenious research program over many years. He concludes we can love others without rewards for ourselves if, and this is a big if, if we develop empathy for the other person.

Some say empathy must be present, others say it’s simply easier to love if we have empathy and compassion for someone. Fortunately, we can teach people to be more empathic, that’s part of what they do at Rose Maiden, teaching clinical psychologists to be more empathic. Teaching empathy provokes love. Sixth, can we see the needs of others as moral perception? Can we see their goodness and worth which will permit us, using Wolterstorffs words, quote, to promote the good in a persons life and to secure that she be treated as befits her worth. How do we know whether someone has worth or not?

If we don’t see, don’t perceive a persons goodness, it’s pretty difficult to promote they’re good. Kelly Monroe and her study of Holocaust rescuers did have, did find a special kind of moral perception present among these people. They saw those they rescued not as members of a despised or foreign group, but as persons who share one humanity. Finally, seventh, psychologists are again conducting studies and writing on vitures, positively valued and relatively stable personality traits.

An earlier psychology scholar in my broad sense of the term, Aquinas, addressed virtues at great length and in great, contrary to most contemporary psychologists that love is virtue that cannot be achieved by human efforts alone. The human nature must be added God’s grace which completes nature. And thus we’ve moved into psychology relevant theological insights to the ways in which, not empirical research, but theology contributes to our psychological understanding of love. I should add, after George’s talk this morning, that I don’t intend to indicate my placement first psychology and then a little bit of theology, that I’m just adding a little light topping of theology to complete the psychological main meal.

I really wanna see psychology in theological context. So, here’s some relevant theological insights. First, theology insists that psychological functioning, including the psychological dimensions of love, be seen in the context of our relationship with God. Second, we need to take sin seriously including the ways in which sin distorts, bends and twists our attempts at love.

I think Augustine and Luther’s idea of homo incurvatus est se, latin for humanity turning or curving in on itself is profound. We start by loving someone, but then we get kinda proud about how well we’re doing at loving the others. Then we get invested in everyone knowing how loving we are, and pretty soon our actions are all about what great Christians we are. When we turn to the question of people becoming more loving, psychologists generally focus on human efforts, theologians, in contrast, also discuss our being transformed by God.

Historical and contemporary works of pastoral care, pastoral theology and spiritual formation discuss this at great length. One key component of that literature is ones relationship with the Christian community, the Church, which can shape our love in positive directions as we respond to God’s command to love one another.

The Church has maintained that love is central to the human flourishing that comes from our reconciled relationship with God in this age, to some extent, and sure in the age to come. The Cross is crucial, indeed asserts New Testament Scholar Richard Hays, we can recover the power of love only by insisting that loves meaning is to be discovered in the New Testament story of Jesus, therefore, in the Cross. When we participate in God’s work in Christ, our love is transformed as we die with Christ and are raised to new life in Him. So, one last topic.

A brief sketch of some ways we can draw on psychological understandings of love in order to provoke one another to love. First, we need to be careful about how we use the term love, given its strong sexual and romantic connotations and its vulgar use to sell everything from junk food to luxury automobiles. In Richard Hays’ memorable phrase, love has become debased in popular discourse, having become a manner for all manner of vapid self indulgence. It’s easy to forget, I think, since we’ve been immersed in, kind of, richer more substantive concepts in this conference that love is used in society in ways that are very different.

Second, we need, we should employ the psychological factors I’ve discussed, encouraging others and ourselves, first, to think carefully about love and our commitment to it as we’ve done at this conference. We need to encourage others to choose to be loving rather than, say, to be fearful or self protective. If certain emotions are conducive to being more loving and other emotions inhibit love, we need to work at putting ourselves in situations and thinking in ways that make love conducive emotions more likely.

Since social situations powerfully shape our loving behavior, we need to choose our social environments carefully and to be especially wary of dividing the world into us, the good guys, versus them, the bad guys. This, of course, is especially difficult in 2016 given the superheated rhetoric and the current election campaign. We also need to work at, to commit ourself to developing empathy and consciously work to understand the experiences of others. We need to develop our ability to see the moral dimension of our relationship with others, and especially to see one another as God’s creation as the persons for whom Christ was willing to die. Finally, we need to work at becoming more loving, at developing the virtue of love. I’m gonna skip a little bit here.

Ultimately I hope we all engage in the task of developing better psychological, ethical and theological understandings of love and how love can be increased. In psychology we need more research of a particular sort, quantitative scientific research, qualitative research, philosophical research, theological research, integrated research. We need not just positive psychology but all kinds of psychology so we address loves failures as well as loves successes. We also need to take seriously our brokenness and sin and the ways in which it produces impaired, inadequate and sometimes even harmful manifestations of love.

Accordingly, we need to look at ourselves, reflect, confess and change. Finally, we need, above all, to return to Jesus the exemplar of love, we need to allow ourselves to participate in the forgiving, reconciling and transforming grace of God in Christ, to die daily with Christ on the Cross and to be raised to new life in Christ, a new life of love. Thank you. [applause]