So you are in college!! All excited about your courses and raring to go every day (since you now have a lot of time to hang out with friends!)? Three years, or more, filled with classes, canteen, friends, assignments, canteen, tests, holidays, canteen, games, festivals, canteen, and a host of other things! You would have big books to help you with many of those, but this little booklet could be important in another, vital way - it could help you, as a Christian, to begin the process of integrating your studies with your Christian faith.
Let’s guess, who you are?
You could be a psychology student or a young lecturer. Perhaps a student pursuing another arts degree but with supplementary courses in psychology. Maybe a social work major or a psychiatry resident? Or maybe you are someone from a totally different background who is interested in the study of the mind, and found the title compelling.
What’s this booklet about?
Most of us divide our world into little bits. It’s easier to handle it that way! So we have our college world, our home world, our work world, our recreation zone, our church world, friends group and so on. There may be some interaction between these worlds, but often these are separate compartments. After saying good-bye to my parents in the morning (Bye, Ma, OK, I’ll eat my lunch; don’t worry, I’ll be back in time to go to the station with Dadima), I slip into my college persona, which is subtly different - heck, I even speak differently, dude! I really love worship songs and hymns, but in college, my friends don’t know that side of me very much, they see only the Shania Twain fan.
It would be sad if most of us cannot integrate what we learn in college with what we learn in the Bible, or practise Biblical principles at our workplaces. At church or Christian meetings, though, we would actively discuss Bible passages and derive the Christian approach to various issues. However, in college, the only guides for our thought systems are our text-books. We may study literature without stopping to think what view of God and life is brought out by Shakespeare or Hardy. We may work as engineers without ever relating God’s fantastic engineering skills to our own design of bridges or software programmes. We may study sociology without learning the Christian perspective on social issues.
This is a major problem! We have, in effect, two parallel belief systems running -one the college/ workplace secular belief system; and one, (on Sundays, mostly), the Christian one. Christian principles rather than supporting and under-girding, or if you like another word-picture, overarching all others, are held almost apologetically, and as if they are contrary to, or have nothing to do with the various fields of human study and endeavour. This attitude divides our world artificially into “secular” and ‘sacred” zones. It brings no glory to God; it speaks poorly about the esteem in which we as Christians hold God’s Word; it reduces our usefulness to God; it robs us of the delight of being one integrated person everywhere; it lowers our own credibility and our integrity. Do we truly wish to be “split-personalities”?
So, this booklet is an attempt to consider the field of psychology - from God’s view-point. We would look at psychology and psychiatry - with Christian “spectacles”. The Christian approach to psychology is set out under four main sections:
to be continued ...
written by Jamila Koshy
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