The Psychology of Jesus

Part 1, No Strings On Him

I teach a class at ACU entitled "Psychology and Christianity" where I explore intersections between psychology and Christian faith and practice. In one of the units of the class we work through insights from my book The Slavery of Death.  

During a lecture covering this material I share that one of my objectives is to describe "the psychology of Jesus," to get inside his head to try to understand how he experienced the world. To be sure, this is a highly speculative endeavor as the gospels are notorious for not revealing much about Jesus' inner life. Still, using the core ideas in The Slavery of Death I make an attempt.

The Slavery of Death is a theological and psychological meditation on this passage from Hebrews 2:

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

The most striking thing about this passage is how it describes the fear of death as the power of the devil in our lives. Anxiety is the devil's tool. We are held in slavery by our fear of death. The devil is the puppet master, we are the puppets, and anxiety is how he pulls the strings to make us dance.

Psychologically speaking, how does this work?

The first thing to appreciate is how psychologists make a distinction between basic death anxiety and neurotic death anxiety.

Basic death anxiety is easy to understand. Basic death anxiety is survival and resource anxiety. Think of the bottom parts of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. 

As I describe in The Slavery of Death, as biological creatures in a world of real or perceived scarcity we grow anxious when threatened or when our resources become depleted. Scarcity drives basic anxiety. Some people in the world are facing acute basic anxiety right now as they live in war zones or face famine. But everyone knows what basic anxiety feels like. We face seasons where money is "tight." We face scarcities of time and energy when we don't have enough time or energy to get done everything that we need to get done. We face scarcities of sleep. 

I like to remind my students of that first weekend of COVID when everyone ran to the stores and bought up all the toilet paper. Basic anxiety, our fear of not having enough, caused massive hoarding behavior. When basic anxiety is high sharing and generosity evaporate. That first weekend of COVID there was a fear that there might not be "enough," so we grabbed more for ourselves. Think also of how economic scarcities, real or perceived, affect the moral climate of a nation. When unemployment is high, wages low, and the cost of living soaring, the generosity and hospitality of a country declines. Scarcity creates xenophobia. If I perceive, either realistically or delusionally, that there's not enough for me I become concerned about outsiders soaking up scarce goods and resources. This simple threat/scarcity/anxiety dynamic explains why fear sits at the heart of our political discourse. If a politician can create a sense of either threat or scarcity the resultant basic anxiety can move votes.

In the next post I'll turn to neurotic death anxiety. But this brief analysis of the role of basic death anxiety in our lives, and its link to moral failure, points us in the direction we'll be heading. Specifically, when people describe Jesus they tend to describe his goodness and love. We're going to try to pop the hood on that goodness to take a look at the engine, the psychological dynamics that gave Jesus the capacity to live such a distinctive and singular life. Taking a cue from Hebrews 2, we're going to give particular attention to Jesus' immunity to "the power of the devil," his freedom from both basic and neurotic anxiety. 

To go back to the puppet imagery, the devil tried to pull the strings of scarcity and anxiety when he encountered Jesus. But (with a nod to Pinocchio here) Jesus had no strings. In facing Jesus’ non-anxiousness, the devil had no power over Jesus. And it is here, with the devil's lack of power over Jesus, were I believe we get a window into "the psychology of Jesus."