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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Sexual questions were very thoroughly dealt with. Luthardt
writes: ‘It is not so much a question of what is right or wrong
for a Christian but of how far he can go.’
Apart from these flagrant faults the failure of Roman Catholic
casuistry is most evident in its rules. They are held to be
applicable to the most difficult questions and decisions of life, but, as
Luthardt points out, they are never adequate to specific
individual situations.
Clearly a casuistry of this kind has nothing in common with
the moral and spiritual temper of evangelical Christianity. On
the other hand, there are some very definite risks in
unwillingness to individualise judgments in the moral realm.
Sin and Symptoms
Modern psychology has shown that it is necessary to
consider every case individually when trying to understand personal
behaviour. Many recent books on psychology by religious
; authors pursue a line of thought which suggests that it is be-
| coming necessary to develop a new kind of evangelical casuistry.
| The most obvious indication of this is the fact that no hesitation
| is shown in making a distinction between Sin—in the sense of
` unbelief in the heart and a wilful turning away from God or
| active opposition to him; and Symptoms—which reveal that a
| personality is disintegrated or diseased.
| In general it is not difficult for a spiritual adviser familiar
with the nature of mental illness to perceive a clear difference
between sin and the symptoms of mental disease without having
to reject his religious and theological points of departure. When
a mentally ill person swears or blasphemes, or indulges in
malicious behaviour, the spiritual adviser knows that the
sufferer’s condition is akin to that of a person delirious with fever.
The question becomes more involved when the behaviour
of a neurotic person is under review. There are good grounds
for the Christian Church’s fear that ‘sin’ will soon be regarded
as a mere synonym for nervousness. To assent to this would
be to surrender the religious conviction of personal responsibility
in favour of a purely medico-psychological point of view. How
is the problem to be solved? Let us consider a few examples.
Disturbances of the sense of personal value, at one time
Q0
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