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The Bible in Psycho-Spiritual Perspective: News from the World of Biblical Scholarship

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Abstract

Since 1991 a new discipline of interest to pastoral psychologists has been brewing in the haunts of biblical scholarship. It is called Psychological Biblical Criticism. The history of this new field and the prospects of future research are chronicled in my book, Soul and Psyche: The Bible in Psychological Perspective (Fortress, 1999). The present article highlights four themes of the book: a) the history of psychological approaches to scripture from Tertullian to the twentieth century; b) Freud and Jung, forerunners of psychological biblical criticism; c) psychological biblical criticism today; and d) revisioning the Bible as a “soul book.”

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Rollins, W.G. The Bible in Psycho-Spiritual Perspective: News from the World of Biblical Scholarship. Pastoral Psychology 51, 101–118 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020050512669

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