By Garry J. Moes

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Some years ago, psychiatrist Thomas Harris wrote a book called I’m OK, You’re OK. It was a product of a trend toward popular psychology which was arising at the time of its publication. Its title suggested a spirit that was prevalent at the time — a desire to overcome a nagging sense of malaise that had swept over the world in the wake of the revolutionary turmoil of the 1960s and early ‘70s. It represented an attempt to sooth the trembling conscience as moral and ethical systems which had guided mankind for centuries were suddenly and catastrophically being thrown onto the ash heap.

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The book made an attempt to head off what appeared to be a future crisis of the soul as it was beginning to be manifested in culture and society — a future that looked to be frightening indeed. It was an attempt to find solace in self, in self-realization, and in so-called “human potential.”

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Paying lip service to the works of earlier psychiatrists, thinkers, and philosophers like Sigmund Freud, Wilder Penfield, Elton Trueblood, Eric Berne, Bishop Pike, Teilhard de Chardin, and many other “great” and not-so-great experts, Harris suggested the old scientific jargon, though a worthy foundation, was not enough to calm the fears of ordinary people.

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“What I hope to demonstrate in this book is a new way to state old ideas and a clear way to present new ones, not as an inimical or deprecating assault on the work of the past, but rather as a means of meeting the undeniable evidence that the old methods do not seem to be working very well,” Harris wrote in the preface of his book.

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The book was acclaimed as a breakthrough. “Harris has stripped away the technical language of psychoanalysis and presented with lucid logic a way to self-understanding and change,” the Los Angels Times said. Life magazine claimed that “When an idea finds its time and voice, it takes on force. Transactional Analysis is the idea. Now is the time. I’m Okay, You’re Okay is the voice. With a little bit of luck and a lot of people trying to screw their heads on straight, I’m Okay, You’re Okay may make it there right next to the Holy Bible or even maybe The Better Homes and Garden Cookbook.”

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Well, perhaps more likeThe Better Homes and Garden Cookbook than the Holy Bible, as it turns out.

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Harris’s approach to happiness through self-realization lasted for some time as a perceived viable solution, but it rapidly became apparent that faith in humanity, for that is what it was, is a formula for disillusionment. It is a life system with a fatal flaw: faith in finiteness. It is therefore a faith in what ultimately is powerless to overcome the fundamental obstacle we humans inevitably face, namely the phenomenon and power of sin. Sin has so fatally crippled the finite self that it has been utterly destroyed as foundation for hope of salvation.

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The Holy Bible, on the other hand, revealing as it does the good news of the “power of God unto salvation,” describes an utterly successful kind of faith. It is a faith in full contrast to the kind of faith that puts it hope in troubled humanness and ungrounded/undefined “positivity” (which rapidly becomes a vapor in the heat of a given moment). Biblical faith is one that saves us from our basic human problem and that accomplishes things that take us finite humans into the realm of the infinite and the otherwise impossible. In that realm, there sits a Power that knows nothing as impossible.

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The other kind of faith is rooted in human frailty (which is undeniable) and is therefore powerless to save or achieve anything to address the nagging suspicion that we are NOT OKAY.

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The key to understanding the difference in these two kinds of faith is found in the respective objects of these faiths. The first and powerful kind of faith has as its object and source of fulfillment an infinite Person who knows humanity and its needs thoroughly because He created humanity and at one point of history became one of us and lived an earthly human life in all of its dimensions, save sin. This Object “gets us,” to use a recently popular phrase. Christian faith, for that is what is being referenced here, puts its trust in One who can accomplish what is humanly impossible and lead us to achieve a high holiness and glorious outcome to life even as it struggles on this miserable plane. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 1:1).

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The other kind of faith puts its trust in a failed object, humanity itself. It accomplishes little or nothing in the way of ultimate satisfaction beyond a deluded complacency that tells us “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” but with no conclusive evidence that this is true. In fact, the evidence is quite to the contrary, as even a cursory survey of the human scene will testify. In the few intervening years since Harris’s book appeared, the world has reached abysmal levels of debauchery, terror, horror, and collapse of civility and civilization. There is hardly an institution of human endeavor and existence that is not abjectly disgusting to an eye with even a modicum of appreciation for what is holy and pure and lovely. Life is vulgar and profane and empty and meaningless and therefore disposable — something like what was said of the antediluvian world when “the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).

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Sin, which clings to humanity like its own skin, destroyed mankind’s necessary connection to its very source of existence. When sin entered the human scene, mankind found that they could not save themselves from the consequences of their own folly. Man could not escape the grip of sin, because sin destroyed his ability to reconnect with the Infinite, were the power to escape could only be found. If the relationship and connection were ever to be restored, God would have do it Himself. The good news is that He has done just that, and He is ready to bestow it to all who trust in Him, a trust which He Himself instills within any human who surrenders to the Giver of this true and perfect Gift. As theologian Andrew Murry once put it, “If God was to do it in harmony with man’s nature, man must be brought to desire it, to yield his willing consent and entrust himself to God. All that God wanted man to do was, to believe in Him.” That is to say, all that God ever wanted from man was for man to entrust himself to God, to become fully dependent upon God’s promises and His power to do what would bless man and make him grow and give honor to his Maker.

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Only then will he be Okay.