How Christian Mysticism and Bion Can Help Expand the Christian Filter: A Response to Bland & Hoard (2026)

This article offers a clinical-theological response to Bland and Hoard’s Lacanian account of Christian perfectionism. I engage with Earl’s clinical work with patient Lucas for exploring the limits of the Christian filter embedded in his Evangelical Christianity. Drawing on Christian mysticism and Bion’s concept of “O,” I suggest that Evangelical Christianity may be enriched by a greater tolerance for mystery, unknowing, and lived experience. Lucas’s perfectionism is understood as a defensive stance, a moral narcissism, that forecloses desire, relationality, and psychological growth by resisting ambiguity and affective experience. Christian mysticism, articulated through Meister Eckhart, offers a non-dual framework in which human longing, fallibility, and desire become sites of growth rather than threats to one’s faith. Integrating Bion’s emphasis on emotional containment and learning through experience, I posit that a mystically informed Christian filter can support both spiritual growth and psychological transformation by holding complexity without collapsing into moralism or certainty.