The following is a comment I offered on the blog of a good friend of mine, Chris Benedict
“This makes me consider how, especially in the church context, when I talk about the truths which I profess to believe, I want to convey them in a way that is psychologically relevant. (When we are about the business of “saving souls”, consider that ‘soul’ is from the word ‘psuche’, pronounced ‘psoo-khay’, and thus ‘psychology’ literally means ‘the study of the soul.) I don’t want to speak things that are just true, I want to speak things which are truth-producing. That’s a nuance which I believe is often missed because of the inertia of both general tradition and perhaps because of the impulse to put up our best faces for one another. Everyone’s a bit afraid of each other. Perhaps this is a way in which it is necessary to fear God and not man, because the stakes are too high, both for this life and the next, to not to push the boundaries of accepted or assumed limitations which stand in the way of a clear path from professed truth to practice.”
This has been a persistent train of thought for me, and I explored it in a few previous posts:
Andrew K. Banks 