This is a Reformed position, but I have heard putative Confessional Lutherans use it to defend their support of everything from psychological therapy that is now a sine qua non of a “normal” life, to Freudian “Truths”, to the daily dosing of soul sick individuals with pills that Alice would be afraid to use.
Now if you think my words strident, stentorian, or stringent, you should hear Hermann Sasse on this score. The rubric that all truth is God’s is a Reformed proposition. Zwingli, the worst of the Sacramentarians, if there is such a thing as a better one, said, “’I venture to call divine also such thoughts as are borrowed from pagans. Truth is always from the Holy Spirit, wherever and by whomever it has been brought forward.’” Sasse remarks, “This would have been regarded by Luther as a blasphemy, just as he regarded as blasphemy Zwingli’s claim that also great pagans like Aristides and Scipio are in heaven” (Sasse, This is My Body, 123).
Thirty years before Freud developed psychoanalysis, whose tyranny of thought we still live under, actually swim in, Franz Delitzsch proposed A System of Biblical Psychology. As of 2003, it was still in print. You would think avowed Lutherans would start with this or at least doff their cap to it. I have never heard it referenced, never seen it cited anywhere. I don’t remember where I heard about it, but I got it and read it.
Interestingly enough his approach is similar to another way psychology is defended as a legitimate tool in a Lutheran pastor’s toolkit. Man is a trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit with the body the domain of medicine, the soul the domain of religion, and the spirit the domain of psychology. Delitzsch also believes man is a trichotomy. Delitzsch’s man consists “of a body, a spirit, and animal soul which he has in common with the brutes” (375).[i] All three, body, spirit, and animal soul, are fallen and it by addressing all three that healing takes place. He doesn’t, however, cede the field to the psychologists or psychiatrists and their understanding of mental illness as disease, but he sees every part of man as being effected and affected by the Fall and so every part needs to be treated to be saved.
The part of psychology that tells you x-percentage of people will choose a blue door over a red or prefer winter to spring are interesting. When psychology attempts to explain why this is so they speculate, but they speak in undebatable propositions. Watch the TV show “Criminal Minds”. I have no idea if its portrayal of the FBI’s Behavior Analysis Unit is even close to accurate but after watching a dozen episodes you too can do the profiling. Try it.
To assert there is truth outside of the One who declared Himself to be The Way, The Life, and The Truth, each one having the definite article with it, is to tell a lie, is to suppress the truth. And what does Romans 1:18 say (present tense) about that? “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” Yup, truth has the definite article here too.
[i] This view can be defended by pointing out that when the KJV translates Genesis 2:7 (KJV) “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”, it is the same word nep̄eš (neh’-fesh) translated “living creature” 1:24 and “every living creature” in 2:19. To be preferred therefore is Genesis 2:7 (NASB77) “Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”
