On Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

I’ve been asked to comment on a certain religious phenomenon called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

That religion would be interested in therapy makes all the sense in the world to me. Therapy comes from the Greek word therapeuein, which means “to heal.” Where should we turn for healing if not the Great Physician of our Souls? Teach us, Lord Christ, to pray to you even as the centurion whom you commended for his faith: “Speak the word, Lord, and my servant shall be healed.” “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). It is our sinful folly that leads us to seek healing in material things and not in your healing word and the therapy of your Spirit, O Lord.

But this I do not understand: This MTD speaks of healing as if it were the same as feeling good about oneself. I have heard young devotees praise God with these selfish words: “It made me feel better.” So it would seem that the passions are the measure of all things. This is, of course, a great error and a confusion, for it is as though the physician were to begin at the outside, with the symptoms of the sickness, but ignore completely the source and cause of the malady. For the source of our sickness of soul is in our will, corrupted by our original sin, in which we all willingly conspire against our better judgment. Ours is a great sickness of soul which springs from our two wills—from our divided will. Neither will is whole, for what our right minds will to be and do, our wills do not wholly will; and what we know to be wrong, this we choose, though with much regret and sadness.

The only true healing comes to us through the Righteous One, who took on our nature so that we might partake of his divine nature and become whole again. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This MTD of which modern people speak is also misguided because it seeks happiness in the wrong place. All men seek happiness, as our Lord well knew when he spoke to his disciples and told them what sort of life would bring happiness (the Beautitudes in Mt. 5). Only the man who finds his greatest good is the happy man. And what is the greatest good of man? Surely it cannot be anything inferior to man himself. And it cannot be the good of the body only, for the body is surpassed in greatness by the soul. The chief end of the soul is to behold the beauty of God Himself and to love the Lord God with all one’s soul. He who has this lacks nothing; and he who lacks this, no matter what other goods he has, cannot be truly happy. MTD promises what no one can deliver: Happiness apart from the crucifixion of the self and union with the divine nature. The perfection of all our good things and our perfect good is God. Happy is the man who knows this and lives by it.