Confounding the Divine and the Spiritual: Challenges to a Psychology of Spirituality

The pervasive inclusion of God or "God-substitutes" (the "sacred," the "supernatural,"the "ultimate") in the psychology of spirituality prevents the development of a truly psychological understanding. Misidentification of the spiritual with the divine projects the determinants of spirituality into a non-human, vaguely defined, ultimately intractable, and non-falsifiable realm. Two other difficulties follow: confusion about the essential nature of spirituality and indeterminacy regarding criteria to adjudicate true and false spiritualities. These three intertwined issues represent unavoidable challenges for the social sciences in general and psychology in particular. Building on the work of Bernard Lonergan, invoking the thought of Viktor Frankl, and citing long-standingWestern theological and philosophical principles, this article elucidates these challenges and intimates a response, an explanatory and normative non-theological psychology of spirituality, which is open to theological elaboration.