Psychology

Sin and Worldview

Tony Reinke Psychology, Reformed spirituality, Reformed theology, Sin, Sin in Culture, Sinfulness, Worldview

“The great danger is always to single out some aspect or phenomenon of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of human apostasy [sin], as the villain in the drama of human life. Such an error is tantamount to reducing direction to structure, to conceiving of the good-evil dichotomy as intrinsic to the creation itself. The result is that something in the good creation is declared evil. We might call this tendency ‘Gnosticism’… In the course of history, this ‘something’ has been variously identified as marriage and certain kinds of foods (the Gnostic heresy Paul warns Timothy against in 1 Timothy 4), the body and its passions (Plato and much of Greek philosophy), culture in distinction from nature (Rousseau and much of Romanticism), institutional authority, especially in the state and the family (philosophical anarchism and much of depth psychology), technology and management techniques (Heidegger and Ellul, among others), or any number of things. There seems to be an ingrained Gnostic streak in human thinking, a streak that causes people to blame some aspect of God’s handiwork for the ills and woes of the world we live in.”

—Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Eerdmans, 2005) p. 61.

Antidepressants on the rise

Tony Reinke Biblical counseling, Depression, Psychology, spurgeon

CNN is reporting that antidepressants are now the most commonly prescribed drug.

“In its study, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at 2.4 billion drugs prescribed in visits to doctors and hospitals in 2005. Of those, 118 million were for antidepressants. … The use of antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs — those that affect brain chemistry — has skyrocketed over the last decade. Adult use of antidepressants almost tripled between the periods 1988-1994 and 1999-2000. Between 1995 and 2002, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the use of these drugs rose 48 percent, the CDC reported. Many psychiatrists see this statistic as good news — a sign that finally Americans feel comfortable asking for help with psychiatric problems.”

What strikes me is that apparently we all know instinctively that we can and should be happier than we really are. We were created to enjoy pleasures forever (Ps. 16:11).

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Related: Dr. Peter R. Breggin, the International Director of the Center for Study of Psychiatry and Psychology writes: “In reality, science does not have the ability to measure the levels of any biochemical in the tiny spaces between the nerve cells (the synapses) in the brain of a human being. All the talk about biochemical imbalances is sheer speculation aimed at promoting psychiatric drugs. … Despite decades of research, thousands of research studies, and hundreds of millions of dollars in expense, no marker for depression has been found. To this day, the individual’s personal feelings remain the basis for diagnosing depression” [Peter R. Breggin, The Anti-Depressant Fact Book (Perseus: 2001) pp. 21, 22].