Christian apologetics and cognitive behavioral therapy : a pastoral model for mental health promotion

Abstract

This thesis aims to argue that the Universal Christian Church has a responsibility to assist its congregants who struggle with mental health challenges. This assistance can be facilitated by considering ways in which the clergyman and the psychotherapist can collaborate to address this much-neglected spiritual task. Furthermore, this thesis aims to show that this ‘spiritual task’ can be accomplished using the practical skills of the Apologists, who in their dialectic process of worldview debate, would be able to redirect their expertise to defend against personal misbeliefs that suppress the spiritual transformation of those who struggle with mental health challenges. By integrating the ‘Apologist’ skills with those of the cognitive behavioral therapist, the tasks of identifying, challenging, and replacing misbeliefs could be accomplished using the admonition given in 1 Peter 3:15: “always being prepared to give a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account”. To correct worldview distortions, Apologists can use their skills within a ministerial church setting to help mental health sufferers alleviate emotional distress by correcting their misbeliefs. Just as the Apologist applies the practical skills (or praxis), in the dialectic process for worldview debate, the professional Christian Counselor applies the same praxis in the modality of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The major interventions used in CBT, such as ‘questioning the evidence’, ‘rational responding’, ‘examining the options’, ‘direct disputation’, and ‘labeling the distortion’, are interventions also used in the praxes of Apologists who use them intuitively from their training in the dialectical method. Methodologically, this research will be established on classical realism and the classical Christian approach to Apologetics. Practically, this work will be framed using Osmer’s fourfold model of practical theology: the descriptive/empirical task, ‘What is going on?’; the interpretive task, ‘Why is it going on?’; the normative task, ‘What ought to be going on?’; and the pragmatic task, ‘How might we respond?’.