Elizabeth Earle-Warfel’s Christian beliefs may clash with Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual stages of development and Carl Rogers’s humanism, but she won’t exclude those views from her classroom at Trinity College of Florida. The tiny, 200-student evangelical institution has just added a psychology major as part of its effort to grow, and it hired Ms Earle-Warfel, an adjunct psychology professor and a pastor’s wife, to lead the program.
James E. Lanpher, Trinity’s vice president for academic affairs, says the college, whose alumni include the Rev. Billy Graham, hopes to double its enrollment within five years, and adding psychology as its eighth undergraduate major should help.
The subject is one of the most popular college majors in the country and fits the college’s focus on ministerial counseling, he says.
But many students attracted to Trinity may have a negative view of psychology, anticipating conflicts with biblical teachings, Mr. Lanpher says, so the new leader will need to walk a delicate line.
He chose Ms. Earle-Warfel, 63, to direct the program because of her four years teaching psychology courses at Trinity, her strong educational background, and her more than 30 years of ministry experience.
Ms. Earle-Warfel, who was promoted to assistant professor, earned a music-education degree from King’s College, in New York City, in 1970. Before she studied psychology, she taught for 15 years at a public school in upstate New York and a private school in Florida.
Her work for the Presbyterian Church, which included directing a choir and a children’s after-school program, stirred her interest in psychology.
“People would come into my office and start pouring out their souls to me unwittingly,” she says. “I could see the problems, but I didn’t know how to identify or do anything about them.”
To find some answers, she sought advanced degrees. She earned a master of divinity from the Reformed Theological Seminary at Orlando and her Ph.D. from Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, in San Francisco, in 2005. Before venturing into college teaching, she counseled elementary students and unwed teenage mothers.
Ms. Earle-Warfel says she treats all patients with empathy, as she says the Bible guides her to. “The only difference is, in a secular counseling situation, you’re not as open to using the Bible or Scripture to illuminate unless the counselee starts the discussion,” she says.
Spirituality and the Mind
Her dissertation was on post-traumatic-stress disorder, which she first observed in a child patient. “I was very interested in why something that triggers a memory can make the body go through a whole range of physical reactions,” Ms. Earle-Warfel says.
Her research explored whether varying physical and emotional reactions to distressing events could be attributed to chaos in the human brain.
Today her research focuses on how the new public-education standards of No Child Left Behind affect the developmental stages of children.
The program at Trinity began this fall, but she is still expanding its curriculum and hopes to broaden its reach beyond the 5 percent of students now enrolled. Her ultimate hope is to encourage more students to pursue further research about how spirituality plays into the body and the mind.
She will model the course load on the standards of the college’s national accreditor, the Association for Biblical Higher Education’s Commission on Accreditation, and the American Psychological Association’s guidelines for undergraduate degrees, with the hope of obtaining that group’s approval of the program.
Majors will be required to take not only 54 Bible and theology credits, but also 30 hours of traditional psychology courses—including research methods. All the psychology courses will be numbered to fit Florida’s standards, to assure that credits will transfer to in-state public and participating private institutions.
The difference between Trinity’s psychology program and others won’t be in the subject matter, Ms. Earle-Warfel says, but in discussions of psychology’s relationship to Christian values.
For example, John’s strange visions in the Book of Revelation might be incorporated in a lecture about states of consciousness, while a “What Would Jesus Do?” stance could be applied to experimental ethics.
“It adds a whole new dimension when you’re coming into the material with a different point of view,” she says. “Hopefully we can start to see if there’s something more happening in psychology than what is physical or neurological. I believe that’s what will set us apart.”