Andy Stanley's Enemies of the Heart

Mr. Stanley, author of Enemies of the Heart, is an able Christian psychologist, but an incomplete Christian theologian. As is the case with many books in the Christian self-help genre, Mr. Stanley isolates several common negative behaviors, and after his explanation of them prescribes several counteractive measures the reader might take. His summary of the modern man’s crisis is a sort of heart-sickness, expressed in Guilt, Anger, Greed, and Jealousy.

Mr. Stanley’s solutions to these problems are the four corresponding behaviors of Confession, Forgiveness, Generosity, and Celebration. There is little obviously wrong with Mr. Stanley’s ideas of Christian behavior, but he provides little insight on how one moves from Greed to Generosity. He says, sometimes decorated in deistic language, the usual self-help answer: just remember this truth and try a little harder. Most of us will find that this is like being told the answer to being fat is being thin; or that the solution to being sick is just becoming healthy.

Of course we can all stand to learn more about virtue; the accumulation of ideas is always helpful. And of course we can always do a better job of exerting our self-will. But is this really the answer to our moral problems? This question is the meeting-place of theology and psychology, and in books like Enemies of the Heart theology is left unexplored. Perhaps this is for simplicity, but it is done at the expense of insightful and helpful psychology.

To meaningfully answer the sorts of questions he raises, Mr. Stanley would need to discuss his views on the problem of evil. Why do all of us tend to greed in the first place? What is it that keeps us from deciding such behavior away? The way Mr. Stanley writes, one would think that Greed and Guilt were dark gods, powerful and personal enough to act on their own accord, yet somehow able to be banished by self-will.

It may seem a heavy burden to lie on the backs of popular psychologists and amateur moralists, that they take up theology as well. Yet, just as one can’t talk well about playing the clarinet without also talking about music, neither can one discuss the human ψυχή without giving some thought to the broader disciplines to which it serves. Answering the question “what is evil” is not a fanciful theological exercise or a task reserved for the intellectual elite…it is the foundation of any discussion, simple or scholarly, of what is the matter with men.