Christian Principles for the Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy

A Neuro-Psychosocial-Spiritual Approach to Religion and Spiritual Experience:
Spirituality as a Core and Inseparable Component of Being

Christian believers understand that God is a real person, who exists connected to, but independent of the created order. The knowledge of God is the foundation of the spiritual journey for the believers in Jesus Christ. The nature of the spiritual experience is grounded in the revealed word of God, the ongoing ministrations of the Holy Spirit, and the individual and communal practices of the Christian faith. This chapter will not provide a full overview on the concept of a Christian spirituality, but focus on what I believe articulates its central tenets in a manner that can be utilized in counseling and psychotherapy, namely how do we experience God.
In the biblical worldview, God is not a projection of infantile wishes or the result of brain pathology, but a real being that can actually communicate with humanity. Humans not only need to be willing to commune with God, but be endowed with the capacity to recognize the presence of God. It is the premise of this chapter that God has created humans with inherent spiritual strivings as it has been posited by Soren Kierkegaard and Jean Calvin.
How does God communicate with human beings? In this regard, the Christian community has a majority opinion, which states that humans have a spiritual (non-material) dimension which connects with God, who himself is spirit. A minority view contends that God communicates with the human brain, and though the process is not well specified, the human brain responds to God’s overtures in a way similar to those made by other humans.
Human beings do not seem to necessitate physical proximity to have their brains relate to others (humans and non-humans). I remember the sense of awe I experienced at the Prado Museum in Madrid contemplating Velazquez’s depiction of the crucified Christ. This feeling of awe is being evoked right now as I remember it and it is not connected to the immediate physical experience of being before this painting. My brain also can be filled with emotion as I hear the stories of bravery of those who a few years ago lost their lives to save the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, from the bullets of a would-be killer. I have never been to Newtown nor do I know any of the people involved, yet my brain can evoke powerful emotions. I recently saw the movies “Lincoln” and “Argo”. Both evoked powerful reactions as well. Even though I knew how the “Argo” story ended, I could not wait to see these 7 Americans leave Teheran safe and sound, or to grieve over the loss of one of America’s greatest presidents. The human brain appears quite capable of relating to that for which it has a point of reference, but no direct experience.
All the above examples point to some form of experience. Be it real, vicarious, or simply imagined to which there is a point of reference - the crucifixion, the mass murder, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the American Civil War. Social and Personality neuroscientists could point to the circuitry that responds to these cues. But, can something similar be said about spiritual experiences? Can we say that we communicate with God through our brain? And if that is the case, can we recognize how the human brain responds to God? At least, we can say that it is possible to study how the brain responds when an individual is engaged in the spiritual practices designed to relate to God. Furthermore, would it be possible to identify the brain pathways that may be associated with these endeavors? Finally, can we say that all human beings have a spirituality even when they do not endorse a religious or spiritual narrative? Can we affirm that spirituality is part of human nature, just as much as our need for love, or our need to be in relationships? Is having a certain of spirituality relevant to our well-being, and therefore, important for a psychotherapist to be able to nurture and harness to further our efforts to heal? This chapter intends to answer these questions in the affirmative.
Spiritual Director James Neafsey (2005) speaks to this in this way, “Where do we find God? The Mystery of God is fully present and active in all human experience. We live and move and have our being in the presence of Divine Mystery whether we are explicitly aware of the presence and transforming power of that mystery or not” (p. 19). The notion of “mystery” in this quote highlights a point that is made in this chapter and throughout this book: the presence of God is not only recognizable through explicitly religious beliefs and practices, but it is also accessible through the various ways, often mysterious to the human eye through which God calls us to respond to him. As Kierkegaard affirms, human beings have no choice but to be spiritual. We were made to commune with God and therefore to have a spiritual destiny. Any anthropological account that leaves God out is psychologically deficient, “The self that lacks God as conscious ideal will reflect the defective ideal that has replaced God” (Evans, 1990, p. 49). John Calvin suggested the fundamental mechanism for the unavoidable human spiritual experience as “sensus divinitatis” (cited in Clark and Barrett, 2010, p. 175), a primal or instinctual sense of the divine that is present from birth as it is not experience-dependent. “Sensus divinatitis” may be insufficient to fully realize the idea of God, which might be also dependent on experiences such as “moments of guilt, gratitude, or a sense of God’s handiwork in nature” (p. 175) as advocated by philosopher Alvin Plantinga.
A Neuro-Psychosocial-Spiritual approach to religion and spirituality in the context of this book means that the human experience of God (through the Holy Spirit’s moving in the individual at worship or at secular moments, through Scriptural reading, through prayer and through other spiritual practices and beliefs), which we term spirituality in the Christian tradition, involves the brain and the psychological experience of the believer.