personality tests on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association

of Certified Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

This week on the podcast, we are responding to questions that we have been receiving for months

and months about how Christians ought to think about personality tests. Personality tests are a huge industry in the United States of America in

particular, and the West in general. It's a billion dollar industry. And Christians get caught up

in using and in taking these personality tests as well. And so we're going to take some time to

talk about that topic

on the podcast this week. As we enter into this discussion on the podcast, we want to first begin

by talking about what personality tests are. And we can say that personality tests are

instruments that are created in order to get a better understanding or a better read on people, what they're like,

what makes them tick, how they fit in, that kind of thing. When we talk about personality

tests, we're talking about all sorts of instruments that are out there, including, as an early

example, the Rorschach ink block test, the Minnesota multifacic personality inventory,

the Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, there's any number of tests that are used to get a gauge

on people's personality. But what we're trying to do is understand people. That's the function

of a personality test. These personality tests really started

in the 19th century, in the 1800s. And most people, when they look back at the beginnings of

personality tests, they go all the way back to phrenology from Gall.

And Gaul had as his theory that the shape and the indentations and the various formations on a person's skull gave you an indication of what they were like, what personality strengths they would have, what personality weaknesses they would

have, of course, phrenology was very quickly debunked and is now ridiculed as junk science,

but that's where we first see in the Western world a first attempt to sort of gauge people's

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