Christian Book Notes

Tyler, David M. God’s Funeral–Psychology: Trading the Sacred for the Secular. Bemidji: Focus Publishing, 2009. 128 pp. $11.95. Purchase at Amazon for $8.76 or less.

Introduction

David M. Tyler is the director of Gateway Biblical Counseling and Training Center in Fairview Heights, Illinois. He also serves as Dean of the Biblical Counseling Department and Vice President of the Board of Directors of Master’s International School of Divinity in Evansville, Indiana. I have had the privilege of studying nouthetic counseling under Dr. Tyler.

Summary

The title says it all: Psychology: Trading the Sacred for the Secular. The book is an exhortation and a clarion call to the church to flee the psychological babble we have allowed to usurp the Bible. Separated into seven chapters, Dr. Tyler looks at God’s Funeral (ungodliness) and what has taken place after His funeral (unrighteousness). Ungodliness has crept into the church via our psychological explanations of what the Bible calls sin. For example, you are no longer a drunkard but an alcoholic. The terminology used is quite important.

Chapter three shows how ungodliness led to unrighteousness which led to “bad feelings.” In other words, we now want to feel good about ourselves because we no longer really need God to explain what is going on in our lives if everything is just a malady that can be “cured” with enough counsel and medicine. Chapter four introduces our living with Canaanites of the Old Testament in the form of our psychologizing sin. We have lost our view of God because of the muck and the mire we now find ourselves.

The final three chapters teach us lessons from the Reformation and exhort us to bury the philosophies we have come to lovingly embrace though they are diametrically opposed to biblical Christianity.

Review

While I now have no problem with what Dr. Tyler writes or teaches, I can recall really struggling with these teachings six years ago when I first met him in class. He was teaching about how our modern-day concept of self-esteem is nothing less than idolatry and that dying to self means not giving a rip about your self-esteem (my words not his).

After having struggled with the truth that the Bible and psychology really do not mix and coming to understand the truth of the scriptures for the purpose of counseling, I can now appreciate God’s Funeral. Tyler’s words are meant to strike a chord within the reader–he strikes that chord as a hammer strikes an anvil.

His chapter on lessons from the Reformation may be worth the price of the book.

Recommendation

Obviously, many will read material in the “nouthetic counseling camp” and scream and yell as I did. God’s Funeral is one of those books. You will either be saying “Amen!” as you read it or you will be throwing it across the room and then picking it back up again because you really want to know where he is going with all of this. Regardless of where you fall on the nouthetic scale, you will want to read Tyler’s work. He gets you to think. I have honestly found that if a book really makes me mad, it has struck a nerve. Be prepared to seek out what nerve has been struck.