The Contributions of Biblical Counseling

The Contributions of Biblical Counseling

June 14th, 2009

The following is a post from Society of Christian Psychologists’ Director, Dr. Eric Johnson (Southern Seminary). This is his third post providing thoughts for us from his recent interaction at an Association of Biblical Counselors conference. You can find the original post at: http://tinyurl.com/nfhs9e.

Though a Christian psychologist, I have been giving a lot of thought to biblical counseling over the past year, related to my renewed commitment to teach in a biblical counseling graduate program, and more recently, my positive experiences at the 2009 conference of the Association of Biblical Counselors. Biblical counseling has made a number of significant contributions to contemporary thought about counseling and the care of souls. Let’s consider some of the most important.

1) The Bible is God’s inspired text, and it contains the most important counseling information in the universe, given to promote true human well-being through the gospel of repentance and faith in Christ.

2) All humans belong to God and he is the most important person involved in the healing of the soul: he is the ultimate environment within which all humans live and move and have their being. Therefore, all Christian counselors need to consciously involve God in their soul-healing efforts, through prayer and the use of gospel resources.

3) Sin is the primary soul-problem that afflicts humanity, because it is universal, and it is the source of our alienation from God, and therefore is at the core of all human alienation from ourselves and one another. It is therefore worse in principle than depression, anxiety, and even schizophrenia.

4) It is God’s design that the church, the body of Christ, be the social institution that is primarily charged with the care of souls. This calling was largely lost over the past 100 years, and biblical counseling has been attempting to put this back, front and center, on the church’s agenda.

5) Modern psychology is not neutral regarding matters of faith, and it is grounded on a worldview that is fundamentally resistant to God’s design for the healing of the soul, and it has become the chief religious competitor to Christianity in the West over the past 100 years. We must therefore interpret modern psychology critically and be careful about what we accept into our thought and practice, so that we do not compromise the genius of God’s soul-care agenda.

6) Before secular cognitive-behavioral therapy came to dominate the field, and when talk therapy reigned (whether psychodynamic or humanistic), the use of homework was advocated by Jay Adams, underscoring the fact that the 167 hours of everyday life between weekly sessions needs to be the real focus of counseling.

7) Though made for a right relationship with God, humans now are idolaters, and many of our psychological problems can be wisely diagnosed as a function of this ultimate falsification of our relational being. In this insight is a theocentric psychodynamic model. No human willingly lives for a mere idol, certainly not Westerners. Yet Scripture teaches that we are self-deceived about this most important of matters. So an important goal of biblical counseling is to help people recognize the ways in which idolatry has been operating at an unconscious level and so fundamentally compromising our ability to live well.

This is a profound and rich storehouse of Christian counseling insight. Integrationists like Gary Collins and most recently Mark McMinn (2008) have acknowledged their indebtedness to biblical counseling, moving them to take more seriously Scripture and Christian thinking in their own theory and practice.

Yet, a survey of integration literature forces one to conclude that the considerable contributions of biblical counseling have been overall largely ignored in the broader Christian counseling community. On the contrary, when biblical counseling has been noted, the focus is almost invariably on its critical approach to modern psychology or its weaknesses. Every movement has weaknesses; we have to do better than that. We need to learn from biblical counseling some of the most important features of a Christian counseling model worthy of the name.