Therapeutic Humanism

Therapeutic Humanism seems to sum up the erroneous aim and focus of so much of the contemporary Church.

“Therapeutic”

• Concern for “perceived needs.”
• The seeker-sensitive movement.
• “Meet people where they are.”
• Much of “Christian Counseling” seems to fall into this category.
• Celebrate Recovery's “Hurts, Habits, and Hangups.”
• Mixing psychology with Christianity.
• The prevalence of programs and groups in modern Churches.

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From Grudem's Systematic Theology regarding “Kenosis Theory” page 551: It just seemed too incredible for modern rational and “scientific” people to believe that Jesus Christ could be truly human and fully, absolutely, God at the same time...Smith points out that one of the primary influences leading some to adopt Kenotic theology was the growth of modern psychology in the nineteenth century: ‘The age was learning to think in terms of the categories of psychology. Consciousness was a central category. If at our ‘center’ is our consciousness, and if Jesus was both omniscient God and limited man, then He has two centers and was thus fundamentally not one of us. Christology was becoming inconceivable for some.’...In other words, pressures of modern psychological study were making belief in the combination of full deity and full humanity in the one person of Christ difficult to explain or even intellectually embarrassing: How could someone be so different from us and still be truly a man?... In this as in many other points of doctrine, our understanding of what is ‘possible’ must be determined not by modern empirical study of a finite, fallen world, but by the teachings of scripture itself.

This same type of erroneous thinking and belief is what has led to the prevalence of therapeutic humanism in the modern Church as evidenced by the prevalence of the modern recovery movement/industry in the modern Church.