The Literature Said Something I Didn't Expect And One Thing I Did - Building the Model: Part 3
The Christian Psychology (CP) literature has produced a substantial body of work on Christian flourishing, but the systematic construct-level work needed for measurement and practitioner application has been largely absent. When I ran the constructs I identified in the CP literature through the Hierarchical Framework of Well-being as my mapping scaffold, two things happened simultaneously. A significant portion of what I found mapped cleanly onto existing Positive Psychology (PP) categories, confirming that well-being at its core reflects common human experience that crosses philosophical and theological traditions. And roughly half of the constructs did not fit anywhere in the existing framework at all.
That second finding was the one I had anticipated. And understanding why requires a brief detour into Christian anthropology.
Positive psychology, broadly speaking, was built on an individualistic philosophical foundation. When PP measures well-being, it is measuring an individual's subjective evaluation of their own life. That is a coherent and defensible approach for most populations in most contexts. But Christian anthropology introduces an assumption that complicates it. Trinitarianism holds that humans, made in the image of a relational God, are primarily relational rather than autonomous. When one enters into a covenantal relationship with Jesus, the Holy Spirit indwells the believer, creating an internal communal dimension to personhood. Individual evaluation of personal fulfillment becomes, in the Christian framework, an intra- and interpersonal evaluation of divine fulfillment. The self is not the only one home. Positive psychology, built on the assumption that it is, has no structural container for constructs that emerge from that theological reality.
I had articulated this to my supervisor before I began coding. The analysis confirmed it.
The lens I named to hold those constructs is covenantal well-being. It warrants its own structural status in the framework for three reasons: it represents a distinct evaluative standpoint, it generated sufficient content to constitute an independent domain, and its constructs were irreducible to spiritual or religious well-being without significant loss of emic meaning. The five content areas that organized under it were communion with God, intimacy with God, vocational calling, love for God's creation, and manifestations of faith. To subsume these under spiritual or religious well-being, as existing PP frameworks would require, would misrepresent CP's theological anthropology, in which the covenant relationship through Jesus is not a feature of spirituality but its precondition.
The thing I did expect was also there, and it is worth naming. Across four independent CP flourishing models, from scholars including Kapic, Pennington and Hackney, Jauncey and Strodl, and Counted and colleagues, a consistent hierarchical relational structure appeared: loving God, then loving oneself and loving others as expressions of that primary love. This structure is consistent with Augustine's theological tradition of rightly ordered love, and it appeared repeatedly across independent sources before any lexical operationalization began, which supports its descriptive validity. The CP literature was already organized by rightly ordered love. It needed someone to name it, build the construct layer underneath it, and make it operationally useful.
In Episode 3 of Building the Model you can see the actual codebook on screen: constructs defined, sourced, and assigned to domains with documented reasoning. The specific covenantal well-being constructs that had nowhere to go in the existing PP framework are named. The tautological analysis that distinguished between constructs that were genuine components of well-being versus preconditions, contextualizers, and predictors of it is shown. This is the evidence, not a description of it.
Episode 4 is where the organizing structure itself gets examined from the inside out, starting with the Greek.
