122 - Atonement and Psychotherapy

Atonement and Psychotherapy
By Don S. Browning
288 pp. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1966. $6.00.

It is curious that a Presbyterian enterprise should have published this book, which is so Wesleyan in its perfectionism, so Arminian in assuming that grace is resistible, and so liberal in its optimism about man's capacity for change. Its boldness may have struck a chord in Philadelphia, and there is, of course, the perennial fascination with the idea of the atonement itself.

Browning takes the ransom theory of Irenaeus, the Latin satisfaction theory of Anselm, and Bushnell's version of the moral influence theory as three great variations on the atonement motif, presents each one in detail and compares them with each other, and then judges their feasibility or adequacy in the light of current psychotherapeutic knowledge. This leads to a series of conceptual parallels whereby the psychotherapeutic relation is joined to God's saving relation, brokenness to sin, the psychotherapist to Jesus Christ, and the therapeutic technique to the atoning work of Jesus Christ.

The therapeutic model is Rogerian client-centered theory. It is important to realize that Browning does not use it empirically, but as a theory of technique. I am inclined to say he uses it as a meta-theory of technique, because practicing psychotherapists will have great difficulty recognizing their actual operations and the profound limitations thereof in the statements about psychotherapeutic attitudes which the author summarizes from the written works of Rogers. Such ideas as the client's actualization tendency, the accepting attitude of the therapist, the need for positive regard, and congruence (the ability to admit "organismic feel-

123 - Atonement and Psychotherapy

ings into self-awareness for symbolization") are radicalized almost beyond recognition. A transactional model would have been more truthful than this crypto-ontological model of therapy, for it would have taken into account the severe limitations of the psychotherapeutic process imposed by fifty-minute time blocks, financial restrictions, the client's ambivalent desire and capacity for change, and the therapist's circumscribed energies, modern knowledge, and faltering use of inner control devices. But Browning wants to pursue an ontological and epistemological line of thought, apparently allowing himself to make a tour de force if needs be, in order to arrive at a "clarifying analogy" (which is to be an analogy of essences) between the two themes of his title.

There is some clarification indeed, but much of it is buried in the author's tendency to overshoot his mark. Analogies should be used playfully, not ponderously. In the span of ten pages one finds expressions such as "basic essence," "fundamental essence," "qualitied energy," "central to the gestalt of this self-concept," "theonomous rootage of the concept," "God's fundamental character," and "anything other than knowing another object in the sense of feeling what it feels is something less than perfect knowledge." How basic can one try to be, and how perfectionistic?

Paul W. Pruyser
The Menninger Foundation
Topeka, Kansas