105 - God's Grace and Human Health

God's Grace and Human Health
By J. Harold Ellens
Nashville, Abingdon, 1982, 156 pp., $7.95.

The author is an ordained United Presbyterian minister, Director of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies, and Editor of the Journal of Psychology and Christianity. He holds degrees from Calvin College and Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Wayne University.

The intent of this book is to add to human health dimensions the crucial significance of a person's relationship to God. A person's actual ontological relationship with God, as well as the perceived relationship, definitively affects the quality or state of that person's health. The book claims that holistic health involves the self - actualization in persons of the full range of grand potentials for growth in body, mind, psyche, and spirit with which God has invested humans by creating them in the divine image.

Ellens defines God's grace as unconditional positive regard for the sinner with far - reaching ramifications. Sin, he writes, is a failure in achievement of authenticity to self and of full - orbed personhood in Christ while human health is the state of having achieved wholeness or being in the process of achieving it and having achieved that degree appropriate to one's stage at any given time.

The author is widely read and makes innumerable references to writers in philosophy, psychology, theology, and anthropology, although at times the references become tedious. He stresses throughout his book the distinctiveness of being Christian in the helping professions and that being Christian in psychological practice is not that the practice conforms to one's theology but that it is the most superbly sound psychotherapy possible. To be a Christian therapist requires that one be a thoroughly effective therapist.

Ellens appears to be what he calls an American evangelical but he has embodied many sound psychological principles in his approach to what he describes as a Christian therapist. He

feels there is growth in the relationship between the evangelicals and the group he calls liberals, and he would like to see that growth continue. This is an important book for the evangelicals but has little that is new for those of a more liberal stance.

E. Dean Bergen
Allentown State Hospital
Allentown, Pa.