St Paul and Sigmund Freud

Romans 7.15-25a

With considerable psychological acuity, St Paul understood - long before the theories of Sigmund Freud turned this into science - that we can genuinely believe in something, and want to do it, but find ourselves completely unable to follow through. Something deep and primitive is embedded in our nature, a sort of instinctive self-centredness - that will not let us go. We are, in fact, enslaved to it.

More than that, patterns of behaviour become embedded in our psyche because of long forgotten events in our childhood. So we play out the thwarted love that a jealous toddler feels for its mother when she sleeps at night not with the child but with the father. And as we grow older, the way that we’re treated by our parents, and their role models - good or bad, shapes the way that we respond to others and treat them in our turn. Parents can never be perfect but we can only hope that they were good enough to save us from further psychological damage.

How can we escape from this troublesome brew of genetic predisposition and social conditioning, nature and nurture? Today some people might try psychotherapy but for Paul the answer is that Jesus can rescue us through a process he called sanctification. Instead of being enslaved to our human nature we can be enslaved to God by trusting in Jesus’ love for us, revealed by his death on the cross, and committing ourselves to let his Spirit remake us in his image.

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Methodist Bishop

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