I graduated from college with a B.A. in psychology, and had aspirations toward being a research scientist. Some time later, when I was called to seminary, I presented myself before the church. Several of the comments I received ran along these lines: "I'm so glad you're getting out of that psychology business and doing something Christian." There is indeed quite a bit of disagreement among Bible-believing Christians as to the legitimacy of psychology. Most religious bookstores have a large section on personal growth materials from the likes of James Dobson, Gary Smalley, Robert McGee, and H. Norman Wright. On the other hand, Jay Adams, John MacArthur, and others have shunned mainstream Christian counseling in preference for what they call "biblical counseling." There are even some groups who refer to the discipline as "psychoheresy."
There are a large number of issues to consider, and there is enough diversity in Christian psychology that it is difficult to accept or reject the entire enterprise as a whole. Here I will address what I've found to be the most common complaint against Christian self-help and counseling materials: the importance of self-esteem to the Christian life. And since the other major issue seems to be the sufficiency of Scripture, I'll rely on the Bible to determine to what extent self-esteem should be a goal in the Christian's personal development. And since I don't have my NASB with me at the moment, I'll use the KJV, just to be different.
Since self-esteem is not a biblical term, it would be helpful to have a definition before getting started. This is more difficult than it might seem. The word has been in the language for centuries. It appears, for example, as far back as 1667 in John Milton's Paradise Lost (VIII, 572). The Oxford English Dictionary gives the general definition, "favourable appreciation or opinion of one's self." In the last century, the word has become a semi-technical term in psychology, with different researchers giving the term slightly different nuances.
The International Handbook of Personality and Intelligence (ed. by Saklofske and Zeidner) distinguishes self-esteem from self-efficacy: "Self-esteem is considered to be a global characteristic of the individual that is relatively stable across time and situations, whereas self-efficacy is situation specific and varies as a function of an individual's perception of personal competence to meet task demands" (639). The book goes on to cite research that self-efficacy has a more reliable impact on performance than self-esteem. The book Self-Esteem by McKay and Fanning also notes that the situational type arises from the ability to handle mistakes and criticism, while "characterological self-esteem" has to do with basic identity, and problems here usually arise from abuse or abandonment.
Perhaps the most helpful definition here is that offered by Chris Mruk in Self Esteem Research, Theory, and Practice, which defines self-esteem as "the lived status of one's individual competence and personal worthiness at dealing with the challenges of life over time." Here, my competence is whether, in my evaluation, I do what I do well or poorly; and worthiness is my assessment of the overall value, meaning, or quality of what I do (or of who I am). Since this is a concise, fairly concrete, generally agreed-upon definition, it is this understanding of self-esteem I intend to use in determining its value to the Christian life.
The reason it is not immediately obvious what a Christian should do with self-esteem is that the believer lives "between the times." We await a salvation that will not fully be ours until Christ returns and all things are visibly submissive to His reign. Yet we already experience some of the blessings of the kingdom of God, which has broken in upon this fallen world and mysteriously co-exists with it until that day.
On one hand, the Christian is created in the image of God, is forgiven from sin, is empowered and protected by the Holy Spirit, and is being conformed to the image of Christ. On the other hand, the Christian in this life is still fallen and sinful, unable to do anything without God (notice the passives in the preceding sentence). The Christian life is one of self-denial, sacrificial love, and daily repentance. One of the five solas of evangelicalism is soli Deo gloria–to God alone be the glory. Since we live in these two worlds simultaneously, what are we to think of ourselves? What can we say of our competence and worthiness?
When God chose to create man, the earth as it existed was already "good" (Gen. 1:25). Yahweh had filled the earth with life, and that life was multiplying and prospering. Then He introduced man with the words, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion" over the various kinds of life (1:26). As the image of God, man has a delegated authority from the Father as His representative over the rest of earthly creation, as well as the unique abilities necessary for being a good manager of God's trust. After creating Adam and Eve, God blessed them as He had the fish and birds, commanding them to "be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." They were also to "subdue" it (1:28). Having completed His creation, God pronounced the whole of it "very good" (1:31-2:1).
Genesis' picture of humanity is positive throughout the next chapter. But in chapter 3, the serpent leads Eve into sin, and Adam follows. What is remarkable about God's response is that He only gives a direct curse to the serpent. Eve's sentence is harsh but implies the continuation of the race, and includes the first promise of vengeance against the serpent. The ground is cursed for Adam's sake, and the pair are thrown out of the garden.
Now that man has sinned, the picture throughout the remainder of Genesis is resoundingly negative. Cain ignores God's warnings and kills Abel. His descendants increase in their defiance and immorality. The summary of Adam's righteous line ends each record with the words, "and he died." In chapter 6 the depravity reaches its nadir: when man multiplies, so does evil. Yahweh observes that "every imagination of the thoughts of [man's] heart was only evil continually" (6:5). The very existence of man grieved God! Following the judgment of the flood, Noah becomes drunk and his son Ham sins against him. The next incident recorded is the tower of Babel, another act of defiance against God. We finally meet Abram as a pagan, and while he is a man of faith, he is not a very consistent or likable person. Isaac follows in his father's footsteps, with the additional characteristic of favoritism toward the wrong son. Jacob's deviousness shows him totally unworthy of the favor God shows Him. The twelve sons of Jacob get negative treatment, especially Judah. Only Joseph comes through unscathed.
Exodus reveals Moses to be an unlikely, initially unwilling leader, and the Israelites whine and rebel throughout their time in the wilderness. We learn of the sins of Miriam, Aaron, Aaron's sons, and other leaders. At least they build the tabernacle according to specifications.
God's encounter with Moses in Exodus 3-4 addresses the question of self-confidence head-on. Moses' problem is not an overdose of self-esteem. He insists that he is unworthy (3:11) and incompetent for his task (4:10). What were God's reassurances? It was God who had given His assignment, and God would prove He had chosen the right man by seeing the work through to the end. God would supply whatever Moses needed, and would work through Moses. "I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say" (4:12).
The layout of the tabernacle and the manner in which its sacrifices were offered served to highlight the ugliness and bloody cost of sin. Yahweh's commands are interspersed with acts of disobedience that demonstrate the Israelites' total inability to follow even the most basic, supposedly easy, requirements of the law. Moses himself eventually incurs God's wrath and is forbidden to enter the promised land. Nevertheless, God is faithful without fail, and intervenes miraculously to preserve His people. Moses is emphatic as to why: " The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people; But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt." (Deut. 7:7-8). "Understand therefore, that the LORD thy God giveth thee not this good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a stiffnecked people" (Deut. 9:6).
Joshua is a positive book, yet Achan sins (7:1), and even Joshua is prone to complaining (7:7-10). The great leader's farewell address to Israel is not encouraging (24:1-27). Judges is a monument to human incompetence when it comes to doing things God's way. The nation is plunged into civil war, idolatry, and servitude to the nations of the gods they adopt. The nation fares little better in 1 Samuel, as the ark is temporary lost to the Philistines, and Saul's self-interest and jealousy eventually drive him to madness. Men as high-minded as David and Solomon cannot escape depravity, and the divided kingdom that follows gets bleaker and bleaker, with only a few momentary, superficial revivals. Even most of the "good" kings turn out bad in the end. God finally sends the Israelites into captivity, and when the way is open for them to return, only a handful do. This faithful remnant runs into its own problems with interfaith marriages and general lack of concern for the things of God. The Old Testament closes with the Israelites in their own land but still very much in exile from Yahweh.
Little needs to be said about Job. He is not a shining example of self-esteem, and the final chapter has him saying to God, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes" (42:5-6). Job's response is similar to those of Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Peter, and John in their encounters with God. The result is humility and an awareness of one's own sin.
The Psalms reveal a balance in self-image. Many of the prayers for deliverance assert the speaker's own righteousness and faithfulness to God (Psa. 26), as do some of the victory psalms (Psa. 18:20-24). Yet other psalms (by the same author) are penitent (Psa. 51) and recognize the need to root out sin (Psa. 139:23-24). The consistency lies in the glory given to God, and in the recognition of His justice and freedom in bestowing or withholding blessing and protection as He sees fit.
Jeremiah is representative of the prophetic view of mankind: "Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins [kidneys, Hebrew seat of the emotions], even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings" (Jer. 17:5-10).
The fact that Jesus showed a great deal of self-confidence must be taken in company with the fact that He was God. Even so, Jesus lived as a human by relying on the power of the Holy Spirit and the will of the Father for everything He did and said, as is most evident in the Gospel of John. Two of Jesus' statements are especially relevant to the question of self-esteem. The first is His teaching of self-denial. "He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal" (John 12:25), and "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me" (Matt. 16:24). The other is His wording of the second-greatest commandment: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Matt. 22:29). Does this imply self-love, or at least love on a level equal to that directed toward others? The apostles seem not to have thought so, for Paul said, "Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves" (Phil. 2:3).
The rest of the New Testament upholds what was established in the Old: without God, we can do nothing. The most positive statement about the human essence is oriented toward the future: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is" (1 Jn. 3:2). Being a child of God has present advantages according to 1 John, such as the ability to love and to believe in Jesus (4:7; 5:1). The very purpose of the letter is to lay out the visible differences between Christians and non-Christians. But always the focus is on what God has done for us.
The definition we have adopted for self-esteem relates to "dealing with the challenges of life over time." The primary life-challenge the Christian faces in the Bible is the struggle with sin. While there are many practical difficulties involved in life, those of which sin is the root are the most important for us to be equipped to handle. A person may be poor at math and thus not be able to balance a checkbook properly. Others may be incompetent communicators, have poor social skills, or suffer from debilitating medical or psychological conditions. Extra-biblical resources may be helpful in such cases. Yet for the biblical Christian, none of these conditions should affect one's self-esteem for three reasons: (1) As illustrated in the example of Moses, and repeated in the New Testament, everything we need to accomplish what God lays out for us is ours for the asking. (2) The challenge of struggling with sin is a universal one; differences between individuals have to do primarily with which sins require the most resistance. (3) "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it" (1 Cor. 10:13). No one is ever physically or psychologically forced to sin.
And so the proper self-esteem for a Christian rests on the Christian's perception of his competence and worthiness in the struggle against sin. The definition stresses that this is "individual competence." By ourselves, how able are we to resist sin? The answer, as we have seen, is in my favorite passage, Gen. 1:1-Rev. 22:21. Even though at any moment we have the natural ability to choose, we are morally unable to consistently choose rightly. Our definition also mentions "personal worthiness," here understood as the quality of what we do in the face of such challenges. What do we, by ourselves, do? We sin. We grieve God. We defy our Creator. We commit acts offensive to His glory, honor, and justice. How good or bad is that? It's bad enough to merit eternal punishment. It's bad enough that Isaiah compares our most righteous acts to filthy rags in God's sight (64:6).
To sum things up, the self-esteem of the Christian by this definition ought to be pretty low. A high level of self-esteem indicates either a misdirected focus (on the wrong "challenges of life"), self-righteousness (belief in one's own ability to resist sin), or an insufficient realization of sin (belief that we do not sin or that the sins we commit aren't that bad).
So where does that leave the Christian? In constant sorrow and hopelessness, steeped in depression and futility? Not biblically. The Spirit produces joy in the life of the Christian (Gal. 5:22). The words joy, rejoice, and enjoy occur about 130 times in the New Testament, and with one exception (John 16:20), they are always used positively. Similarly, Christians are to be full of confidence, which is the primary concept behind the word hope. Faith also has an aspect of confidence to it. Yet this joy and confidence arise not from our own ability and worth, but from God's deeds and His character. I submit the following definition for God-esteem: "living in awareness of God's own competence and personal worthiness at dealing with the challenges of one's life over time."
Let's take a brief look at this concept. To what challenges of our lives is God relevant? Where are His concerns, and in what areas do His skills lie? Everywhere. As the title of a popular devotional goes, God is in the small stuff, and it all matters. This includes not only sin, but all the other problems we face. What is God's competence? By Himself, how able is He to provide a way out of temptation, and to help us overcome any other challenge? He is absolutely able, even in the face of our own inability. In fact, one of the main themes of the Corinthian letters is that God is most glorified through man's weakness. Our infinitely rich God is glorified when His poor followers are nevertheless content in Him. He the Healer is glorified when His children realize their terminal illnesses are nothing compared to the glory that awaits them in heaven. Our righteous God is glorified when we, sinful as we are, nevertheless press forward to pursue sanctification, and make every effort to imitate His character. What about God's worthiness? How good are God's works? The Psalms declare God's deeds to be awesome and wonderful and mighty. There is nothing that approaches the absolute goodness of everything God does.
When we see depression, learned helplessness, frustration, worldly guilt, and destructive self-contempt, it is not so much from a lack of self-esteem as a lack of God-esteem. The one who says "I'm no good because I can't keep the house clean" is focusing on the wrong life challenges, as well as not trusting God to provide a way to overcome that obstacle. The one who says, "I'll always be in debt" is likewise resigned to living short of God's goals for financial responsibility. Those who see an unattractive face in every mirror need to understand that God made it as it is and that they are perhaps being overly critical of God's handiwork. (God also led the human race to develop make-up and other things that might help.) The difference between worldly and godly sorrow over wrongdoing (2 Cor. 7:10) keeps guilt from becoming a self-esteem question. Recognition of God's forgiveness (though not without cost to Him) allows us to forgive ourselves once we have repented. Self-contempt often arises from too much focus on one's self and not enough time spent with God.
It is my belief that Christian psychologists and self-help writers have the right idea. From looking through their material, most of them root the Christian's confidence and reasons for happiness in what God has done for them, and teach reliance on God for strength and ability. But they are unwittingly misleading, even counter-productive, to use the term self-esteem to describe Christian joy and hope. As a result, the accusation that such ministers preach a "self-esteem" gospel, while unfair and inaccurate, is one they have largely brought upon themselves. While some such as Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller have clearly secularized their gospel message, the bulk of popular Christian authors have not done so.
I do see in Christian psychology some trends symptomatic of American individualism. The Christian life is not primarily about one's own blessing and well-being at all, but about glorifying and obeying God. It is for this reason that I recommend reading John Piper, who in all his books writes about delighting in bringing glory to God. The Dangerous Duty of Delight is a short one that serves as a good introduction to his weightier volumes. Where Christian psychology can help is by removing mental obstacles to this delight, and suggesting step-by-step ways to bring our focus back where it needs to be. Dropping self-esteem from the vocabulary would be a good start.
For a concise statement of my beliefs about humanity, see my Declaration of Faith.
