OCD, Scrupulosity and the Protestant Introspective Conscience: Comparing John Calvin’s and Chat GPT’s Advice for Those Suffering with Religious and Moral Anxiety

Last weekend I gave a paper at the Evangelical Theological Society, Ontario and Quebec Region Annual meeting. As I was pondering what topic to treat in my next blog post, it occurred to me that some people might be interested in seeing what a paper given at an academic conference might sound like. This particular paper is a good option for posting to my blog given that I deliberately wrote it in a more personal, accessible manner than the average academic paper. The title of the paper was 'OCD, Scrupulosity and the Protestant Introspective Conscience: Comparing John Calvin’s and Chat GPT’s Advice for Those Suffering with Religious and Moral Anxiety', and above you can see a picture of me as I originally delivered it at Wycliffe College on October the 10th 2026. Below you will find the paper.

OCD, Scrupulosity and the Protestant Introspective Conscience: Comparing John Calvin’s and Chat GPT’s Advice for Those Suffering with Religious and Moral Anxiety

1. SETTING THE SCENE — THE PROTESTANT INTROSPECTIVE CONSCIENCE

The trend-setting scholar Krister Stendhal famously argued in 1963 in his article The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West that most Protestant interpretations of Paul had for the last five hundred years been led astray as a result of the 16th century Protestant Reformers’ error of reading into Paul their own modern, Western ‘introspective conscience.’[1] Stendahl's main point was that individuals such as Martin Luther interpreted Paul through the lens of their own European late medieval experience which was, especially for Luther, a world of intense spiritual introspection and religious anxiety. In this article Stendhal drew a sweeping, clearly demarcated line from Saint Augustine in the early 5th century all the way to the Reformers in the 16th to Freud in the 19th, arguing that Christian interpretation of Paul took a wrong turn with Augustine's famed sense of interiority and has essentially never fully recovered. Stendahl's overall perspective was that, even with his relative chronological proximity to the Judaism of the 1st century of which Christianity was initially a part, Augustine erroneously removed from Paul and his letters his thoroughly Jewish worldview. In doing so he corrupted the original, pristine Jewish Pauline Christianity with a fundamentally gentile way of thinking which emphasized an almost obsessively inward-looking theological and spiritual orientation which was foreign to Paul and his fellow Second Temple Jews.

            Over the decades since its publication Stendahl's article has been severely criticized for its historically implausible drawing of a straight line through the whole of Western history from Augustine to Freud. But in other ways Stendahl's argument has been remarkably successful, especially in so far as he anticipated startlingly early the hand break turn that Pauline studies would experience beginning with the 1977 publication of E. P. Sander's Paul and Palestinian Judaism.[2] Not only did Stendahl anticipate the NPP's turn toward Paul's Jewishness, it also anticipated the now very trendy 'Paul Within Judaism School'. The general consensus among Pauline scholars today was first convincingly articulated by Stendahl in this article — we must re-Jewish-ify Paul and for that matter Jesus if we are to understand what the NT authors were trying to say.

            In the face of the onslaught of these newer interpretive movements within Pauline scholarship, the more recent work of figures such as Stephen Westerholm, Stephen Chester and Jonathan Linebaugh has endeavoured to take the best insights of the NPP and the PWJS into account whilst re-asserting the ongoing relevance and accuracy of major themes in the Protestant Reformers Pauline exegesis. This work, especially that of Stephen Chester, has revealed that although Luther himself certainly suffered from chronic religious anxiety, and that although later forms of conversionist Protestantism certainly did read back into Paul's texts a very modern sense of religious and moral anxiety, the magisterial Reformers such as Luther and Calvin were not guilty of the interpretive sin with which they had been charged. Both Luther and Calvin were completely clear that the pre-conversion Paul, far from suffering from a plagued 'introspective conscience', was completely confident that he was successfully obeying the Torah in a God-pleasing fashion. In my dissertation here at Wycliffe I am exploring how Calvin understood Paul's Damascus Road conversion experience to be the opening of his eyes to his own great sinfulness which he was not able to perceive prior to his conversion. Neither Calvin nor Luther were the source of 18th and 19th century Protestantism's obsession with conversion experiences understood as the source of eventual inner peace after a long battle with religious and moral anxiety.

2. APPLICATION TO TODAY — SCRUPULOSITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

In Canada today around 1-1.5% of the population suffers from diagnosable OCD, which is a mental disorder characterizes by extreme anxiety. In one subset of OCD known as 'Scrupulosity', this anxiety centres around moral and religious themes. I was diagnosed with Scrupulosity in 2014 after being hospitalized due to the severity of my particular case of OCD. It took me until around 2019 to recover from this acute form of OCD. In my recovery journey God used both contemporary scientific psychological perspectives and my Christian faith and theology to effect this healing. Reformed theology was especially key to my recovery. There is likely no other class of people in the world above those with Scrupulosity who more fully embody Stendahl's concept of an 'introspective conscience'. That is the essential nature of the disease — a hyper-over-sensitivity of conscience which renders the person unable to function in everyday life. One would therefore expect someone such as myself to gleefully thank Stendahl for freeing me from the moral scruples of those Pauline "misinterpreters-in-chief"[3] Luther and Calvin. Not so! The rest of this paper will, in line with this conference's theme, take the form of a case study comparing Chat GPT's advice for those struggling with religious and moral anxiety with the advice of John Calvin. My hypothesis prior to entering anything into chat GPT was that it would provide a generic smattering of psychological advice drawn partly from legitimate, scientific psychology and partly from contemporary pop psychology.

3. CHAT GPT'S ADVICE

The prompt which I entered into Chat GPT was "What advice would you give to someone experiencing moral and religious anxiety?" It is important to note that its response was hugely conditioned by my many previous queries over the last year or so of using Chat GPT, so it already possessed a significant amount of information about me and my situation. All in all, Chat GPT's advice impressed me in so far as it's psychological advice was not tainted by pseudo/pop-psychology as I thought it might be. It's most consistent emphases, which it repeated many times in various forms, were to A. Learn to tolerate uncertainty with regard to one's exact moral state, and B. Refrain as much as possible from seeking reassurance with regard to one's exact moral state. These pieces of advice are obviously very connected to one another, and they are the fruit of the development by mental health professionals and researchers of uses of CBT and ERP to treat OCD. All of the advice given was sound, and Chat GPT was also sure to point people in the direction of professional mental health care if this anxiety seemed to be going beyond general, occasional anxiety into a form of diagnosable OCD.

            Building off my many previous queries about Reformed theology and John Calvin, Chat GPT also provided some surprisingly germane theological advice — "For someone shaped by the Reformation tradition, I would particularly emphasize the distinction between the ground of our acceptance before God and our fluctuating assessment of our own spiritual condition. Our feelings about the adequacy of our repentance or the strength of our faith are not necessarily reliable measures of God's disposition toward us." At this point I must be careful not to simply be determined to treat Chat GPT as a strawman in this case study and be overly dismissive of its contributions. The above sentences are absolutely correct and potentially helpful for someone suffering with religious and moral anxiety! The problem here is therefore perhaps less a case of theological accuracy and more a case of theological depth. Notice, for example, that Chat GPT is still placing the focus on "Our feelings about the adequacy of our repentance or the strength of our faith", whereas Calvin and Luther exhort the Christian to look away from the self to Christ.  In fact, this is exactly how Luther described justification by faith — we are to look away from and outside of ourselves and fix our gaze on Christ by faith.

4. JOHN CALVIN'S ADVICE

In our attempt to ask Calvin for advice about scrupulosity, we are inevitably engaged in a certain degree of anachronism. Calvin had never heard of Freud, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Having said that, prior to the dawn of modern psychology at the turn of century, it was primarily religious figures who had provided spiritual and psychological care for humanity from time immemorial. The Reformers were certainly no strangers to the problem of religious and moral anxiety and the issue of wanting to feel a sense of religious assurance. So, whilst Calvin cannot coach us in the details of Exposure and Response Prevention, he has much to say to those seeking comfort and assurance of a spiritual kind.

            In my dissertation, which is an examination of John Calvin's reception of Paul's conversion, I am arguing that the primary difference which Calvin saw between the 'old' pre-conversion Paul and the 'new' post-conversion Paul was that his prideful confidence in his own ability to merit God's acceptance through his obedience to Torah had been shattered by his conversion experience, and that God had brought him instead into a humble state of being fully dependent on Christ for his righteousness. Given that the primary problem which Scrupulosity creates in its victims is a severe lack of trust in their own morality, so much so that they will not even leave their own basement (true story! - that was me in 2015), it is again perhaps surprising to see me recommending John Calvin's approach of full reliance on God's capacity rather than our own. Won't this simply make the Scrupulosity worse?

            My response to this is that it could make the Scrupulosity worse, but only when one misunderstands or misapplies the overall tapestry that Calvin is weaving. To see a fuller picture of this tapestry, I want to consider Calvin's commentary on 1 Corinthians 10:12 where Paul writes, in the context of the need to resist moral temptations, "Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall." Improperly applied this verse would send the Scrupulosity into overdrive. But what does Calvin have to say? Does his exhortation to locate one's ultimate confidence for one's wellbeing and safety in God rather than in the self mean that Calvin intends for the elect to be constantly consumed with anxiety? No, quite the opposite in fact. Their Spirit-enabled locating of their confidence in God rather than themselves is the very thing that allows them to trust that they are safe, even from their own moral weakness.

Calvin first writes concerning this verse:

"The Apostle concludes from what goes before, that we must not glory in our beginnings or progress, so as to resign ourselves to carelessness and inactivity. For the Corinthians gloried in their condition in such a way, that, forgetting their weakness, they fell into many crimes. This was a false confidence of such a kind as the Prophets frequently reprove in the Israelitish people."[4]

Calvin argues here that Paul is attempting to undermine the Corinthian's sense of self-sufficiency in the things of God, so that they can instead locate their confidence with regard to righteousness in God rather than in themselves. Calvin goes on to combat the Catholic doctrine of his day which suggested that this text implied that Christians could not have assurance of their own salvation. Calvin writes in response to this doctrine:

"...let us observe that there are two kinds of assurance. The one is that which rests on the promises of God, because a pious conscience feels assured that God will never be   wanting to it; and, relying on this unconquerable persuasion, triumphs boldly and  intrepidly over Satan and sin, and yet, nevertheless, keeping in mind its own infirmity, casts itself upon God, and with carefulness and anxiety commits itself to him."[5]

Calvin's language of "triumph[ing] boldly and intrepidly over Satan and sin" is striking. And what is it that enables this defeat of both the Tempter and our own sin? It is "relying" on the "unconquerable persuasion" that they will never lack God's presence to defend them, protect them and provide for them. In the very next verse in 1 Corinthians Paul highlights the fact that it is God's intervention that protects the believer from sin, not his or her own moral strength, "No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it" (verse 13). If it is God's strength which keeps the believer from sin in the face of temptation, then we must logically reason that own our moral frailty is never the decisive factor in our lives — as the doxology in Jude 1:24-25 so powerfully articulates, God's ability to keep us is far greater than our ability to stray — "Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen."

            Throughout my years of recovering from severe OCD and my present-day managing of the disease, my primary weapon of choice is the conviction that because I am ultimately relying on God for my wellbeing and not myself, I need not be afraid of anything or anyone, even the moral terror brought on by Scrupulosity. It is this unshakable confidence in God's care for me that I built and still build my ongoing engagement with the tools of modern psychology such as CBT and ERP.

5. IN CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I am absolutely not with this paper seeking to denigrate proper, professional, scientific psychological approaches to treating moral and religious anxiety. In fact, were it not for these resources, I would never have recovered and in fact may not even still be alive today. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the many psychiatrists and psychologists who tirelessly worked with me towards my healing.

            What I am advocating is a both-and approach. I would advise those struggling today with religious and moral anxiety to take advantage of all legitimate, trustworthy, properly-administered sources of assistance. For me, the one-two punch of modern psychology’s insights into the human brain and John Calvin's profound theology of locating our ultimate confidence in God's gracious care for us rather than in our own care for ourselves was more than enough to knock out cold the Goliath of OCD in my life.

Thank you.

            [1] Krister Stendahl, ‘The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West’, The Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 (1963): 199–215, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816000024779.

            [2] E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Fortress Press, 1977).

         [3] Stephen J. Chester, Reading Paul with the Reformers: Reconciling Old and New Perspectives (Eerdmans, 2017), 326.

            [4] John Calvin, Commentary On First Corinthians, trans. John Pringle (Calvin Translation Society, 1847), para. 83521 of 100427, Accordance Bible Software Version.

            [5] Ibid.