- JUSTIN POYTHRESS
- AUGUST 4, 2025
- REFORMATION21
About a decade ago, I did a deep dive into Myers-Briggs types. A few years ago, it was Annie F. Downs recurring Enneagram Summer podcasts.[1] These assessments are like white collar emotional donuts. And the roots of these tests go deep. There are foundations.[2] People with PhDs. All kinds of books and conferences. Why not? Is there anything more fascinating to learn about than…you?
Personality tests have taken off in the past century because they provide a broad doctrinal foundation which secularism can build on top of. This doesn’t mean they’re bad. But we need to understand that a personality test isn’t merely an innocuous tool for fun conversations at your corporate retreat. It’s playing in the sandbox of the deepest mysteries of the universe—what is human nature, the source of evil, and the pathway to peace?
Personality tests trade on a lot of biblical truth but their analysis and answers fall short of the Bible’s vision of who you are and who you can be.
What Personality Tests Get Right
If you dive deep into a personality test, you can emerge with one of the most robust plans for self-actualization our secular world can come up with. It gives you a place to be and become—the two key needs in identity formation. This is a wonderful aim. You want to learn about yourself so that you can become a better version of yourself. You want to develop awareness of your limitations and blind spots, and lean-in to your natural strengths and giftings.
Personality tests shine because of their ability to fill a yawning identity gap in today’s world—they affirm your givenness. In terms of the two major identity questions, “who am I?” and “who should I become?” our world fails to give satisfying answers to either one. Our world is most maddeningly vague, however, when it comes to supplying any definitive answer to who you are, in a fixed and stable sense. Is there anything you can know for certain about you?
Enter the personality test. Every personality test acknowledges shades of gray and imprecision, but its attraction is in its black and whiteness. For instance, you are an Enneagram 2 (The Helper), which means you are not Enneagram 8 (The Challenger).[3]
Each type comes with a synopsis, with strengths, weaknesses, personal growth plans, and even suggestions on which other types you should marry. Finally, you’re looking at something that tells you who you are. You’re not just a confused bundle of fears and desires—you are a certain type of person because that’s how you were designed. The “design” word is verboten (too religious), but the implication is everywhere. Personality tests spit out get declarative sentences of fact, not more open-ended questions asking you to speculate on who your feelings might lead you to be today?
Take the Myers-Briggs test for example. The four letter categories come from four categorical questions: your favorite world (extraversion/ introversion), how you process information (sensing/ intuition), how you make decisions (through thinking/ feeling), and how you structure your approach to the outside world (judging, perceiving).[4] The test forces participants into one category or the other by asking questions with only two options, designed to pick one preference to the exclusion of the other. You’re relieved to find a place where a binary is not only affirmed but required.
Personality tests also do well in recognizing the biblical root issue of pride, and how it manifests in recurring trouble spots. Your biggest strengths are also your biggest weaknesses. Fore example, if you’re a high D on the DISC- you’re going to be driven, but prone to be domineering. This leads to gentle suggestions for “growth and development.” People are more open to addressing their shortcomings when they see those as the flip side of their strengths.
What Personality Tests Get Wrong
The problem with personality tests is part of the heritage of our postmodern age. All the tests are militantly non-judgmental. You are driven towards a bland, milky, blanket affirmation of all people, everywhere, no matter what. When I look at myself: all of my foibles, weaknesses, strengths, flaws, sins, at my acts of love, hate, or selfishness—they simply stem from who I am as a person. It’s neither good or bad. I just am.
Jesus paints a different picture of human nature: “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” (Mt 12:35) Those sort of moral weighings—good and evil—sound like heresy within a personality-test-worldview.
This means the solution implied in personality test philosophy ends up in a very different place than the gospel. Personality tests imply that if only everyone could understand themselves and other people better, then everyone would naturally work towards self-improvement and harmony.
The Bible has less of a rosy outlook: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6). The Bible’s not talking about misunderstandings that happen because you haven’t learned the other person’s love language. There’s such a thing as sin. As selfishness. If you skip over pride and selfishness, and simply understand more about why someone acts, thinks, and prefers what he does, that will not create deeper respect for the person. It’ll often have the opposite effect.
Using personality tests as the primary lens for understanding people tends toward either pragmatic manipulation or typology-racism. Both errors play into our desire to simplify people into a panel of buttons and levers: “If I give my wife her love language of acts of service, she’ll give me my love language of words of affirmation.” Or, “I’m an Enneagram 5 Investigator, so that means I can play well with Enneagram 9 Peacemakers, but can’t stand those Enneagram 6 Loyalists.”
No matter how much test-makers protest that their design is to make you more receptive and compassionate towards others, there’s an intrinsic rigidity in the end result that calcifies pride and bias. (It’s ok to like and dislike who I do; I just need to learn to play the game better.) According to the Myers-Briggs Foundation, “People who are self-aware honor their preferences first and stretch to the others when appropriate to the situation (emphasis added).”
You should praise the Lord because you are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14). We should always be eager to learn more about ourselves and others, but do so with a healthy dose of humility. People are more than chess pieces whose lines of movement we need to memorize in order to play the game. We are marvelously complex. We’re created in God’s image, fallen, and need to be renewed into the image of Jesus (Ephesians 4:22-24). The Bible has far more to say about who people are and what they need than any test our world comes up with.
Justin Poythress (MDiv, Westminster Theological Seminary, PA) grew up in Philadelphia, and has since lived and worked in Nashville, Indy, Fort Myers, and now in Boise, where he is pastor and lives with his wife, Liz, and their daughters.
[1] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7LVQLEH6SjsO2AhDmOsUzW
[2] https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/myers-briggs-overview/
https://www.everythingdisc.com/
[3] https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions/
[4] https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/myers-briggs-overview/
Tags
Truth2Freedom's Blog 