Fromm and Christianity(USE AS GUIDE ONLY)

Fromm and Christianity(USE AS GUIDE ONLY)

Fromm and Christianity(USE AS GUIDE ONLY)

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I. Introduction
Reaching from antiquity the philosopher Aristotle once said, “The unexamined
life is not one worth living.” Psychology is the embodiment of this thought, for in it is
found the foundation for understanding the human character, the embodiment and
progenitor of life. And yet, in science there is no field more held in doubt and
uncertainty than the field of psychology. While some would question my placement of
psychology into the realm of science, I do so because at its core, psychology is about the
testing of hypotheses and the study of a particular subject, both criteria that fit within the
scientific frame of thought. In the case of psychology, the study is that of man1 and in
particular, his mind. What makes psychology a more challenging scientific pursuit is the
nebulousness in which the human mind is conceived and the competing views of how
humanity is to be defined. In this paper I will be taking the views expressed by the
psychologist Erich Fromm and comparing them with those views taken by the religion of
Christianity. First will be an overview of the basic tenets of Christian and science
matrixes, upon which people of either orientation view the world. Part two will entail a
brief overview of the governing paradigms that Christianity and Fromm base their
observations. Since much of part one concerning Christianity in particular will be the
same as part two, care will be taken to not delve into repetition. The point of breaking
the discussion down into these first two parts is too show the clear difference between the
governing postulates of Christianity and science, in particular that of Fromm. Part three,
the main body of the paper, will be a discussion of two main ideas, and how they are

1 I use the anthropomorphic “man” to delineate humanity and to be brief, not to portray a sexist mentality.
In all usages the reader should understand that I mean “men and women.”
dealt with by Christianity and then, by contrast, by Fromm. These areas of interest will
be the human propensity for destructiveness or sin and the foundation of ethics. Sources
will primarily include Fromm’s works, “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” and
“Man For Himself” and the Bible (KJV). The conclusion which I have come to and
which will be reached by the end of the paper is that the two spheres of psychology and
religion, particularly that of Christianity, have no meeting ground in which to coordinate
their prospective visions of how to help man in his struggle to make sense of his mind
and the environment in which that mind finds itself struggling.
Christianity and Science: Two Theories of Knowledge
“Governing dynamics” was a concept which John Nash, from the movie “A
Beautiful Mind”, wrestled over in his pursuit for a new theory of mathematics. Those
very “governing dynamics” are what caused, and continue to cause, the split between
religion and science, namely those which deal with the pursuit of truth by man. As it
would take too long to go into at length the differences of the epistemological paradigms
these two views hold, I will give a brief summary with particular attention to the
contrasts.
Simply put, Christianity and most other religions, hold to what is called the
coherence theory of truth, which maintains that all ideas, to be considered true, must be
“held together” in a single web of thought, i.e. that no proposition is correct, or rather
justifiable, outside of the governing system. The system hangs and falls together forever
dependent on the pattern of thought formed, which is based on the governing axiomatic
beliefs and all other information contextually considered through those governing