Caroline Nikolaus's Archive

Viktor Frankl. We learned about him in class today, and I think that was one of my favorite lectures of this semester. What an incredible man. His story is heart wrenching, his character is beyond unique; it is steadfast and loving and humble and open. He has many Christ-like qualities and I put him in the category of the Fall- not because he himself seemed fallen, but because the world around him was crumbling and he rose above it.

I have been to Auschwitz concentration camp. It was at the end of a mission trip to Poland my youth group went on. I remember reading Night by Elie Wiesel and actually finishing it as we pulled up to the camp. You can’t really describe what it is like to walk around and see all the brick buildings, the dorms, the shoes, combs, hair. The gas chambers. It is like walking around a ghost town, only wondering in a sort of awe at the horrors that happened there. That was a fallen time. That was a time where death and life intermixed in a twisted dance that left everyone stumbling. Evil prevailed in expected and unexpected ways. Evil blinded; evil killed.

Frankl seemed to remain certain through his time at Auschwitz. He helped others, he cared for the sick, he survived. Frankl decided to persevere as best he could, and he did so with grace. This reminds me of Christ as he carried the cross through the streets of Jerusalem. He was scorned, spit at, discouraged, beaten, broken. Yet he showed kindness and perseverance to finish the task. Frankl had accepted death as a possibility. So did Jesus.

Anna Freud is a fascinating woman in history, heir to her father’s thoughts, life and work. With a high intelligence and high curiosity, Freud pursued psychoanalysis after her time as a teacher. She studied fantasies and dreams, listened to her father, and worked at applying her knowledge to analyzing children and developing new ways to educate them.

According to Michael Shapiro in one article, “Anna Freud is widely regarded as the cofounder of psychoanalytic child psychology,” drawing on “the experiences of her childhood to develop her psychoanalytic theories.” I want to look at how Anna Freud and her theories claim a renewing tone towards humanity. First of all, Anna’s life is spent working. Her superb work ethic lets her progress far in the field of psychoanalysis, lets her discover new theories and add to old ones. She creates a way for patients, especially children, to be healed, restored to functioning level, renewed. She sees that things can be done to help people, she sees that by continued research, progress can be made that will benefit society.

One incredible and intriguing thing about Anna Freud is her complete dedication towards her father. Their relationship is one I wish I could observe. Anna is a faithful constant. She stays by her father’s side, learns what he teaches, becomes one of his patients, collaborates with him, expands his theories, carries on his life’s work, and cares for him. She even becomes his primary caregiver when he contracts cancer, not his wife. Anna Freud seems to be the dedicated, persevering type. She sees potential in humanity and works tirelessly to draw that out of people, of children, of her father.

I feel like we could learn a bit from Anna Freud. We, as ACU students, take so much for granted, and yet we sit. We procrastinate. We apply ourselves, many times only because we have to. We should work a little more like Anna Freud. We should think a little more about how we can help others more.

What do we make of Freud’s depiction of humans? He brings us the idea of the unconscious mind. A scary thought. A new thought. An awakening thought. Freud sees into each individual, diving deeper than others before him to explain why we act the way we do. What drives us. What motivates us.

Freudian thought falls under many categories. Under Creation, we see Freud’s view of man, that man possesses innate tendencies and instincts that want to act out. How does this fit into our view of God’s creation of man? Are we born with original sin, or are we born good? Is our id, as Freud calls it, our sinful nature? Do we constantly struggle against our id, try to overcome it and act in a more righteous way? This sounds a lot like the book of Romans to me. So Freudian thought falls under the category of the Fall too, that man has these desires that are primal, sexual, lead to potentially bad things. That man makes mistakes and wants for selfish things. Then we add the ego and superego, redemptive qualities to complete Freud’s theories. Qualities that find parallels with religious morality, values, faith. Would you consider your moral code to be your superego? Is it defined by your faith and religion, or other things as well?

I would have to say that Freud brings us ideas about the Restoration category as well, for he presents psychoanalysis as a pathway towards healing. It is relieving- after all his explanations about how we are truly thinking, how we really feel, even if we might be suppressing or repressing those feelings- that he provides a type of therapy to work through those feelings, process and try to understand ourselves. One very positive thing about Freudian thought is realizing even if we do not know where our desires and motivations come from, we have a chance to understand and pay attention to them.

It might be easy to associate evolution with Charles Darwin and think of no one else, but what about Herbert Spencer? Seven years before Darwin ever publishes Origin of Species, Spencer expresses his own theory in an article called ‘The Development Hypothesis.’ One of his main points is that creation is a myth; it has no basis in fact. What do Christians say to this, looking at creation in Genesis?  Many believe the creation story is a metaphor for something bigger…in some ways, a myth that explains some of the larger aspects of Christianity like the fall, our role in the world, God’s character. For Christians who accept this, Spencer’s criticism does not completely eliminate the validity of their faith, for they could believe in creation theories other than the literal Biblical interpretation. For Christians who do accept the creation story in Genesis as literal truth, they can argue that indeed, there is evidence to back their faith. For example, some argue the Bible was written by real people who existed in history and therefore the stories in the Bible are real and true as well. Obviously there are deeper arguments for both of these views, I am only skimming over them.

Spencer becomes more specific in another argument from this article when he says, “surely, if a single cell may, when subjected to certain influences, become a man in the space of twenty years; there is nothing absurd in the hypothesis that under certain other influences, a cell may, in the course of millions of years, give origin to the human race.” I think it is important for Christians to think about evolution. Some Christians I meet will either immediately declare evolution as wrong because they feel it goes against the Bible, or, because they have never read about or researched it; they judge without knowing what they judge. Some ignore the topic altogether. Some do not want to get involved. Some believe that however the world was created, that truth does not affect our active relationship with God right now, it should not affect how we live our lives.

“Kant’s life was a life of thought,” says Henley (p. 180). This is undoubtedly true as we see what major contributions to philosophy, psychology and religion he has given us. Kant goes against the ideas of Hume (that nothing is certain because everything we know comes from subjective experience) to create his own theology. He claims that humans think about things in certain ways because there was already something that existed before subjective experience to show how to think about them. He explains this in his categories of thought: “those innate attributes of the mind…that explain subjective experiences we have that cannot be explained in terms of sensory experiences alone…(p. 193).” Kant believes humans have knowledge to some extent about the workings of the world, before they ever experience it. This makes me put Kant’s ideas under the category of Creation. I think about how God created us. How we are able to be convicted, how we have an innate sense of what is right and wrong, how some things we just know. There are things in us humans that have not been taught. As C.S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity, “a man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line…If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”

Kant believes the human mind creates the universe. He looks at morality therefore as something each mind is aware of and has the choice to act upon. His categorical imperative is similar to the golden rule in that all humans should act upon the moral maxims they have set up to hold others accountable to. Kant’s ideas about humanity and how we are created have similarities with Christian theology but his view of God’s role in our lives and how we were created differs.

It is interesting to apply Isaac Newton’s theology to the C-F-R-R model. In Newton’s eyes, God abandons the world after he forms it, leaving humans to be and do what they will. He experiments, studies and observes the universe, discovering laws and principles that explain how the universe works. So instead of humans interacting with God through faith, prayer, supplication, etc., Newton believes that it is through understanding the universe objectively that one understands God. In a way, I think this is Newton’s form of redemption. Humans are created and then left to their own devices, alone in a mysterious world. It is through studying the world that humans become closer to God. In our text book, one Principle of Newtonian Science is this: “Natural laws are absolute, but at any given time our understanding is imperfect. Therefore, scientists often need to settle for probabilities rather than certainty. This is because of human ignorance, not because of any variance in natural laws (p. 107).” Newton acknowledges that humans are not perfect, he sees that humans will never be able to fully understand everything. Humans are limited. This might sound similar to how the Church has been claiming the same for years and years, that God works in mysterious ways, that there are so many unknowns in the world, that people should be satisfied living in the dark… However, while Newton is familiar with these limitations, he refuses to accept them. His curiosity is not subdued, and answers ARE found. What a revolution! Maybe the Church thought this was the fall of humans? But you can see now how people begin to look at religion- look at God- differently. How science soars and religion is questioned. In this lies a restoration of knowledge, a restoration of human potential that has been squandered in the past. 

According to Aristotle, Thales is the founder of philosophy. He is most famously known for his claim that the world is made of water. When thinking about creation, Thales does not attribute significance to the gods but to natural explanations, an innovative notion for these times. Whereas everyone else makes sense of life through the lens of how gods think, how gods act, how gods are involved with humans, Thales downplays supernatural interaction to instead focus on natural principles. He looks to the laws and order of nature, what he can observe, what he can break down and explain.

I like the way one online article describes Thales’ contributions. This article explains that Thales’ pioneering success comes not from the fact that he declares water as the substance of all life, but the fact that he attempts “to explain nature by the simplification of phenomena and search for causes within nature itself rather than in the caprices of anthropomorphic gods. Thales is important in bridging the worlds of myth and reason.” This bridging of myth and reason opens up a whole new perspective to humans, a new lens that they can look through. Now, people begin to seek knowledge from studying the tangible world at their fingertips. If they find answers in the physical, what does that say about the supernatural? Do gods become powerless? Do myths lose all validity? And if people have been contributing everything to the gods, especially creation, what now do they believe?

Another interesting thing to think about: Thales sees how water falls from the sky, how the earth soaks it up, how water evaporates, rises to the clouds. Through solely observing, Thales discovers a cycle of life, and this cycle is malleable. With knowledge comes power. What level of power do people at this time think they have over the environment? If anything, Thales shows the world that by study and break down of natural processes that have long been in place, people can gain knowledge on how to change them! People can take reason and use it for their benefit, for their advantage, and for their manipulation. Thales’ cosmology pushes against traditional beliefs to create a new way of thinking.

“Thales of Miletus.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 07 Sep. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/589798/Thales-of-Miletus>.