The Future of Biblical Counseling, Part 4

The Future of Biblical Counseling
Dreaming a Dozen Dreams

Part 4: Dream Number Three
Biblical Counseling Will Be Historical

Welcome to a multi-part Blog on The Future of Biblical Counseling. We need clarity on the issue of what makes biblical counseling biblical. I invite you to join the conversation.

Dream Number Three: Biblical Counseling Will Be Historical

The future of biblical counseling is the past. During the last twenty years we have witnessed the Christian community returning to its proper respect for that “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1-3). History, Chesterton reminded us, is “the democracy of the dead.”[i]

Counseling Wars

I vividly and sadly recall the “counseling wars” that occurred while I was in seminary—wars pitting competing modern counseling “camps” against each other. I also recall thinking, “Surely the Church has always helped hurting and hardened people.” That sentence sent me on a quarter-century search for the legacy of Christian soul care and spiritual direction. Simultaneous to that, God’s Spirit was moving many others along the same path.

Returning to the Ancient Paths

Biblical counselors of the future will return to the ancient paths (Jeremiah 6:16). They will seek and apply the ancient legacy and consensual wisdom for living found in the writings of great historic Christian soul physicians.

Church historian Thomas Oden illustrates how blatantly we have discarded the grand wisdom of the great cloud of witnesses. He examined how in the 19th Century those who wrote about pastoral counseling quoted copiously from believers of the past. He then compared how those who wrote about pastoral counseling in the 20th Century quoted exclusively from contemporary or past secular counselors and not once from Church history.[ii]

It is well past time to return to past times—to seek wisdom from those who have gone before. We can learn from them how to change lives in our changing times with Christ’s changeless truth.

[i]G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004, p. 3.
[ii]Thomas Oden, “Recovering Lost Identity.” The Journal of Pastoral Care 34 (March 1980): 4-19.