"If I could live today over again," is a question in Donald Miller's Storyline productivity planner. A question designed to help us focus our priorities.
Our life is our responsibility. One thing Donald Miller nor Dr. Frankl leave out is our responsibility BEFORE GOD.
My friend suggested this tool and I printed out the daily pages and did not really digest the steps...until now. It is important to think about what is behind what we are implementing in our lives.
WHY DOES IT MATTER TO STUDY AND LEARN THE BELIEF BEHIND OUR THINKING?
What we think about and believe shapes our lives in all of the important areas. Whether we realize it or not, the basis of our beliefs...shape us.
A quick caution:
My son quoted a friend who quoted a past professor who said something like this, "God is truth. To know the Bible is to know the truth about the truth. Theology is to know the truth about the truth about the truth."
Sometimes we want to know the truth about the truth about the truth and not know THE TRUTH!
Donald Miller states, An integral part of the SPS, involves asking yourself what would happen most if you could “live today over again.” This idea was first proposed by Dr. Viktor Frankl, a Vienese psychologist who worked with depressed and suicidal patients. Asking them to consider “what they’d do differently the first time around” was a mental trick that allowed them to assess what was really important and learn from their past mistakes even before they made them. You’ll find asking yourself this simple but profound question will keep you from getting caught up in trivial problems and will allow you to focus more on what really matters. Most people wake up worried about all the stuff they have to get done, but if you think about what you’d do differently if you pretend you’re living today over again, you’ll find yourself realizing most of the stuff you worry about isn’t worth it and instead add more relational elements into your life. It should be noted Dr. Frankl cared for more than 30,000 depressed patients and not one committed suicide under his watch. Asking yourself what you’d do differently if you were living today over again is one of the keys to living a more meaningful life and assessing priorities." © 2013 Donald Miller Words, LLC
While I admire Dr. Frankl's opposite of the victim mentality model that is so present today and I admire him. However, he does not approach it from Biblical Thinking. For example, on the category of the Nature of Man, Dr. Frankl forgets an important piece.
"We can agree with Frankl that man has serious responsibilities and is not determined by his environment,
experiences, or genetic factors. In that sense, he brings welcome relief from what many Freudian-oriented Christian psychologists today are teaching. Scripture clearly warns that man is "without excuse" (Romans 1:20). Frankl's system, however, does not see man as responsible before God, but only as responsible to himself."
I've included information on his book, "Man's Search for Meaning," and a Biblical Critique of this book below for your information.
His book, Man's Search for Meaning,His best-selling book Man's Search for Meaning (published under a different title in 1959: From Death-Camp to Existentialism, and originally published in 1946 as Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, meaning Nevertheless, Say "Yes" to Life: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp) chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate, which led him to discover the importance of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most sordid ones, and thus, a reason to continue living. Frankl became one of the key figures in existential therapy and a prominent source of inspiration for humanistic psychologists.[3] (Wikipedia)
A Biblical Critique of Man's Search for Meaning,
Drawing on his horrendous experiences in a concentration camp under the Hitler regime, psychiatrist Victor Frankl has developed
a form of treatment he calls "logotherapy," in response to man's search for meaning in life, particularly under conditions of intense suffering. Unlike many of his colleagues, he does not display an open hostility toward Christianity. His writing reveals at least some belief in the existence of God, although he
has not embraced the Christian faith and evidently prefers to separate his religious beliefs from his psychotherapy. Interestingly, Frankl faintly recognizes that his profession has usurped the role of the pastor: "Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest
or rabbi in former days" (p. 138, emphasis added). The best way to evaluate his approach to man's problems is to look at some categories--categories which are also addressed by Scripture:What is the nature of man? What is man's basic need? What is man's fundamental problem? How can that problem be solved? Who is the major agent for change? What is the goal of that change?
NATURE OF MAN
In general Victor Frankl sees man as a free, self-determined
agent who uniquely determines the meaning of his own individual
life, having the potential for either great good or great evil. He stresses man's responsibility for his own life: "things
determine each other but man is ultimately self-determining" (p.
157). He asks, "How can we dare to predict the behavior of man?" (p. 155). Yet he cautions that "freedom...is not the last word"
(p. 155) but rather "is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness" (p.156).
In contrast with many victim-oriented psychologists of today, Frankl describes the danger of seeing man as "nothing but the
result of biological, psychological, and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment" (p. 153). He warns
that "this neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free" (p. 153).
Departing from the behaviorists, Frankl laments that for too many years, "psychiatry tried to interpret the human mind merely
as a mechanism" (p. 156). Instead, he claims that "the innermost core of the patient's personality is not even touched by a
psychosis"..."the incurable psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being" (p. 156).
Frankl sees the primary motivation of man as "the striving to find meaning in one's life" (p. 121). This is not merely "a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives" (p. 121), but the major driving force for man's actions.
Later we will see how this presupposition forms the framework for his definition of
man's basic need/problem, as well as his therapeutic methods. Frankl believes that man has the potential to become either "swine or saint," depending not on external conditions but rather on the decisions of his own free will. Drawing on his concentration camp experiences, he notes that: "Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil?" (p.108)
Biblical Response. We can agree with Frankl that man has serious responsibilities and is not determined by his environment,
experiences, or genetic factors. In that sense, he brings welcome relief from what many Freudian-oriented Christian psychologists
today are teaching. Scripture clearly warns that man is "without excuse" (Romans 1:20). Frankl's system, however, does not see man
as responsible before God, but only as responsible to himself.
www.christiandiscernment.com/Christian%20Discernment/.../02%20FranklThere is no place in his system for absolute standards of value, as determined by God, to distinguish between good and evil. Frankl carries man's free will far beyond the
responsibilities outlined in Scripture. Even though man is responsible before God, the Bible repeatedly affirms God's sovereign control over the affairs of man (Ephesians 1:11; Daniel 4:34, 35; Proverbs 19:21, 16:1, 16:4, 16:9, 20:24, 21:1, 21:30,
21:31; Romans 8:28, 29; Romans 9). Man does not have the ability, on his own, to become either "swine or saint." Scripture teaches that man's nature is sinful,
and that left to his own devices he lives in rebellion against God (Isaiah 53:6, Romans 3:10-18). He is spiritually dead in his sins, apart from God's divine intervention to give him spiritual life (Ephesians 2:1, 8, 9).
Our conclusion must be that Frankl's view of man, though containing elements of truth, is biblically inadequate.
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