Some tantalizing quotes from our recent conference unapologetically taken out of context for your tasting pleasure:
Bill Hathaway: “Psychology is a social construction that gives us pockets of truth about the real world.”
From a presentation on the history of the psychology of religion project begun in the 19th century. He was talking about this historical project that was originally undertaken to explore and explain religious experience. Of course, the explanation was also reductionistic since it was undertaken from a naturalistic worldview–one that rejected the possibility of the supernatural. We should admit that all human explanations are reductionistic. But some more closely approximate the world as God created it.
Another Hathaway quote: “We don’t need to be therapy prostitutes, doing whatever the client wants.”
I’ll leave that one without explanation.
JKA Smith: “All science is hermeneutic, a take or interpretation of things…Science is culture…so the interaction between faith and psychology or theology and science is cross cultural.” And, “The most important questions of Christian psychology are these, What’s at issue…What’s at stake?”
Richard Schultz:
“Biblical interpretation is not complete by coming to the meaning of any one text.” On the necessity of reading the bible in light of the whole, or, the importance of building a biblical theology.
Musings on Faith and Psychology 
I like the comment about “therapy prostitutes.” My own agency participates in the accumulation of a data pool at a major university in the Midwest. This “outcomes” data will eventually be parsed out and analyzed by this university as a part of an ongoing effort to determine linear causative links between presenting behaviors, treatment modalities, and subsequent improvement (or amelioration of presenting behaviors). “Outcomes” become the final yardstick for appropriateness and effectiveness, when “outcomes” are defined as merely eliminating symptoms which are uncomfortable or undesirable. The American Counseling Association exhorts its members to use only treatment modalities which are “empirically proven,” or in other words, shown by (secular) research to “work” toward the “outcome” of getting rid of the problem. And since HMO’s are further muddying the treatment waters by requiring “results” (outcomes) in defined time periods, counselors who try to survive in these shark infested waters are increasingly succumbing to the pressure to define their work by how satisfied their customers are with the results. Imagine what a slave God would be if He “worked all things for our good” according to this definition of “our good”!