The Psychology of Christianity

For many years I was a humanist, one who gave a nod towards God but ultimately focused on human experience and human truths. When I converted to Christianity I found that my humanism could fit right into the concept of Christ. I was slow to embrace the supernatural, but Christianity is highly meaningful even without the supernatural. Christianity holds it own even if taken as a secular system. So compelling is it to the individual’s sense of self and meaning, that “blind faith” is not really necessary.

Jesus, in his proclamation of “I am,” was most fully human. So fully human that all for which a human seeks meaning he realized and discovered in himself. He was fully self-contained, that is, he lacked nothing--he was not incomplete, psychically and emotionally, in any way. If sin vis a vis lust, ignorance, pain, experience of time, foreboding, incompleteness is the lot of humankind, and the Law, as Paul said, makes us more aware of this sin in each and every one of us, Jesus was the exception because he was not overwhelmed and distracted by loneliness, lust, pain, ignorance, time. He solved for himself the problem that all humans face (and find unsolvable by themselves), which is sin. He overcame sin. And in so doing he overcame sin for all humans as the one human who was able to, the model of how it can be done. So to believe in Jesus is to believe that he is the way through which we can all achieve peace and contentment, self-realization, independence, breaking our dependency upon sin.

Jesus was the one human who achieved awareness of the divine spark within him. He is (“I am”), he is all men psychically and emotionally, the sum of, the representative of, the Son of Man. He is the Truth—the truth that all humans seek. We seek him, we need him, because of our utter inability to achieve the peace and contentment he achieved, the escape and triumph over sin that he accomplished. Paul said, sin is death. To triumph over sin is to triumph over death. Paul seems to have been able to see mostly clearly all that Jesus meant--perhaps because Paul saw most clearly what sin is and how crushing it can be. Paul was able to triumph over sin, but only through Christ, the model of the Son of Man. All of the theology/humanism that I once believed is contained in Paul’s philosophy. Unlike the other disciples, apostles, Paul had been an enemy of Christ, so overwhelmed with sin was he. Through Jesus, Paul overcame sin and accepted himself and knew the truth that is in Christ. Paul therefore is in a way a model for all humans. For all humans doubt and suffer, brought low by sin, know meaninglessness and anomie firsthand. Yet all can experience Christ—the awareness of his message of escape from meaninglessness—that is, escape from sin. Paul was a living, breathing human, a frail, sinful man—who in his life and transformation through Christ is the ultimate witness.

Paul, teaching Christ, brought to this humanist many years ago the missing link that I was seeking, which is the transformation of conversion to the knowledge of the presence of Christ.