The leading idea of my PhD thesis is that if revelation is the way in which we come to know God, then it must be in some sense a process of learning. I set out to show that the kind of learning that takes place in revelation is comparable to the way in which we learn in everyday life. In helping us to know God, the Holy Spirit makes use of the ordinary mechanisms of human learning.
In order to show this, I constructed an overall theory of learning, drawing on the fields of cognitive and social psychology. I showed that the search of personal identity lies at the root of learning and supplies the primary motivation for learning. When we become Christians we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, whose work is to reform our identity as children of God and followers of Christ. Revelation is a process of personal formation, in which we are drawn into the likeness of Christ and learn to see and respond to the world in new ways.
My thesis is published here in full. You can download the whole thesis or explore it chapter by chapter using the links below.
Alternatively, a subsidiary page gives a chapter by chapter summary of the work and contains links to the individual chapters, index and bibliography.
In 2024, I did a presentation for the Tyndale conference based on the these. The theme for the practical theology strand of the conference was ‘sin’, and the aim of the paper was to suggest that the key to an understanding of ‘original sin’ can be found in a theory of cognition. Below is a link to the PowerPoint presentation. You will need to click on ‘Notes’ at the bottom left to view the script.
What light does cognitive psychology throw on the doctrine of ‘original sin’?