The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective

Abstract

THE RECIPROCATING SELF: HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE. Jack O. Balswick, Pamela E. King, & Kevin S. Reimer, 2005. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, Pp. 334, npi. Reviewed by Tim Sisemore (Psychological Studies Institute/Chattanooga, TN). In The Reciprocating Self, Balswick, King, and Reamer raise the bar for Christian psychological scholarship. Much integrative literature has languished because of shallow approaches that essentially support mainline psychological theories with biblical or theological proof texts. In contrast, Balswick and colleagues develop a theological construct of the nature of persons, and use it to organize and explain the major tenets of developmental psychology, yielding a fundamentally Christian understanding of human development that is theologically rich while incorporating a wealth of insight from research. The authors begin by observing that developmental theory lacks a guiding teleology, or goal for development. This exposes a weakness of purely empirical approaches to understanding persons as they lack a context of meaning for persons and our development. Taking cues from recent theological works of Brown, Murphy, and Malony (Whatever Happened to the Soul?, 1998) and Grenz (The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei, 2001), Balswick and colleagues support the recent trend to extend Trinitarian theology to the understanding of the self. Briefly, they begin with Brown et al.'s nonreductive physicalism that maintains that the is not an entity in itself, but an emergent property of humans that describes our ability to relate to God, others, and self. The soul is thus a sum of our encounters with others. This relationality is the key to who we are as persons. To be human is to be a particular being in relationships, distinct and unique, yet inseparably bound up with the other (p. 36). This is the essence of being a reciprocating self, a living in reciprocal relationships that also marks the image of God in us. These assumptions are, of course, somewhat controversial, and I suggest those wanting to see alternative proposals on the nature of the soul and theological anthropology in general to consider the work of Cooper (Body, Soul, & Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, 1989) and Beck and Demarest (The Human Person in Theology and Psychology: A Biblical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century, 2005). Yet, the strength of the current work is how the authors take this concept and expand it as they interact with a sweeping array of research on human development. …

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