Abstract
This paper considers the particular resonances between the experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and a theology of Holy Saturday that emphasizes Christ’s “going to the dead.” On the psychological front, the paper reviews common aspects of OCD; on the theological front, the paper outlines the arguments of Hans Urs von Balthasar concerning Christ’s Holy Saturday suffering and solidarity with humanity. The paper then utilizes a “Chalcedonian conception” of balancing theology and psychology, with each informing (and not eclipsing) the other, by examining the ways that a study of OCD and Holy Saturday together can prevent harmful distinctions between the spiritual and the scientific, the sacred and the secular.
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Notes
It should be noted that how one would put these ideas into practice with non-Christian counselees is an entirely different, complicated matter—one worthy of its own study.
I am grateful to Adam D. Tietje and Alan E. Lewis for introducing me, through their writing, to this phrase.
Tietje (2018) offers a key example of what can happen when this theology-psychology asymmetry is reversed. He critiques theologian Shelly Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, in which “Rambo takes trauma to be the interpretive lens through which to read the Christian story and, in turn, do theology” (p. 58). Her “hermeneutics of trauma” (p. 58) shapes her view of Holy Saturday as a day without the hope of the resurrection: “It is after a complete end and without a new beginning” (p. 59). He sees her argument as being light on the Trinity and heavy on hopelessness—seeing everything through the lens of trauma theory leaves Christ in the grave, merely in solidarity with the human dead. In looking at Rambo’s work through the lens of the Chalcedonian pattern, we see that “to use trauma or trauma theory as a hermeneutical lens for doing theology puts trauma in the place of logical priority and conceptual independence over against theology” (p. 62).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my faculty advisor at Duke, Dr. Jeremy Begbie, for his guidance in shaping the scope of this paper.
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Lund, E. Holy Saturday and the Experience of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: a Chalcedonian Approach. Pastoral Psychol 70, 71–85 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-020-00936-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-020-00936-z