David Powlison
Happily, in the past thirty-five years the church of Jesus Christ has rediscovered biblical counseling. Now in order to rediscover something, it must have been lost. How was biblical counseling lost in the church? In order to understand how this happened we need to turn back the pages of history.
English-speaking believers have a long history of case-wise pastoral care. Many of the greatest Protestant writings are marked by an ability to bring Scripture to bear sensitively on varied “cases”; Thomas Brooks’ Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, Richard Baxter’s A Christian Directory, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Jonathan Edwards’ A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections all stand out. Each of these pastoral writers had God’s burning concern for doctrinal correctness, moral uprightness, a disciplined devotional life, and Christian service. But these pastors also possessed a rich measure of the Shepherd’s discerning love: not only did they know people intimately, but they had a feel for the road of progressive sanctification.1
Edwards’ classic is almost 250 years old, the others more than 300 years old; so, identifiable biblical counseling could be found well into the 1800s. Jay Adams cited Ichabod Spencer as “a sample of one sort of pastoral counseling that was done by a Presbyterian preacher prior to the near capitulation of the Christian ministry to psychiatry. In his Sketches, Spencer discussed a large variety of problems and how he handled them.”2 Spencer wrote in the 1850s, but the well of biblical counseling wisdom that had been trickling for years gradually went dry in subsequent decades.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American Christians basically lost the use of truths and skills they formerly possessed. That is, practical wisdom in the cure of souls waned, even while the conservative church, by definition, retained its grasp upon orthodox doctrine, biblical moral absolutes, the spiritual disciplines, and the missionary calling. The church lost that crucial component of pastoral skill that can be called case-wisdom: wisdom that knows people, knows how people change, and knows how to help people change. A shepherd’s skill is an applied art and science; it is a form of love that abounds in knowledge and discernment in working with people. Yet this ability to apply truth to specific “cases” atrophied. In fact, by the early twentieth century, liberal theology and secular psychology were ascendant in the counseling domain.3 Only dim echoes and shadows of former wisdom could be heard and seen among conservative Christians.4
Instead, secular psychologies claimed the turf of counseling expertise and of insight into human nature. Conservative Christians may have retained parts of Jonathan Edwards’ formal theology, but psychologist William James was heir to Edwards’ style of careful observation and reflection.5 The Christians took the Bible, and the psychologists took people; not a happy situation for needy people in either camp! The growing edge of pastoral care occurred not among ministers of the gospel of Jesus but among ministers of a secular or liberal gospel. Freud’s psychoanalysis and other nascent psychotherapies were adapted to shepherd a people without the Shepherd: the mental hygiene movement, Harry Emerson Fosdick’s pulpit, and Carl Rogers’ therapeutic gospel of self are landmarks in the first half of the twentieth century.
The psychologies not only claimed the turf of counseling; they made good their claim. Sociologist Philip Rieff accurately titled his book on twentieth-century America The Triumph of the Therapeutic and noted astutely, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. . . . If the therapeutic is to win out, then surely the psychotherapist will be his secular spiritual guide.”6 Rieff nostalgically mourned the death of Christian culture, but he was a modern man making do, not a prophet calling people back to the living God.7 The goals, the truths, the methods, even the possibility of biblical counseling vanished in the psychological revolution. In fact, biblical counseling not only disappeared, it became unthinkable.
By the mid-1960s when biblical counseling was rediscovered, it emerged as an alien discipline in the midst of three psychologized communities. The cultural setting of the activity called counseling or psychotherapy could be likened to three nested circles whose differences, even sharp differences, occurred within a fundamental consensus. The huge and dominating outer circle was secular psychology. Within this circle the pioneering theory-builders, the university graduate and undergraduate programs, the credentials, the mental health system, the journals, and the books set the intellectual and methodological pace. The middle circle consisted of liberal pastoral theology, which defined the field of pastoral counseling, even in conservative seminaries. The smallest circle contained professing believers who were psychologists and therapists.
The larger circle dominated the intellectual agenda and therapeutic methods of the two lesser circles. Thus, religious counselors joined clinical psychologists, social workers, guidance counselors, and psychiatric nurses in a vast army of practitioners within the “enlisted” ranks of the cure-of-souls professions. The “officers” were the psychiatrists and personality theorists who provided cognitive content and philosophical rationale for the mental health endeavor. Anyone who wanted to talk about counseling, or read counseling, or join an association of counselors, or go to school in counseling, or do counseling, did it somewhere within the big circle. Biblical counseling emerged as a stranger in a foreign land.
Secular psychology dominated counseling, defining discourse about people and their problems. The social, behavioral, and medical sciences attained enormous social power, intellectual prestige, and self-confidence. As a result, the entire practice of counseling in the twentieth century became encircled by and permeated with secular versions of how to understand and help people. Various forms of psychotherapy—secular pastoral work—overwhelmed the biblical cure of souls; various theoretical psychologies—secular theologies—overwhelmed biblical understandings of human nature and functioning; various therapeutic institutions—secular church communities—overwhelmed the church as the primary location for helping people with their troubles.
The most perceptive psychologists recognized and frankly stated what they were doing. Even Freud, contrary to most of his disciples, denied that the psychoanalyst’s role was a distinctly medical role. He stated that the psychoanalyst was a “secular pastoral worker” and need not be a doctor.8 For example, Freud’s noted disciple Erik Erikson had his professional training in art! Carl Jung commented in similar fashion, “Patients force the psychotherapist into the role of a priest, and expect and demand of him that he shall free them from their distress. That is why we psychotherapists must occupy ourselves with problems which, strictly speaking, belong to the theologian.”9 B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two consciously and specifically offered substitutes for the truths, techniques, and institutions of the Christian faith. In fact, behavioral psychologists are the priest-equivalents in Skinner’s heaven on earth.10 The big circle of secular psychology posited a secular universe. The leading psychologists and psychiatrists were secular people who wanted to help secular people. It is no surprise that they offered a substitute religion, because the problems they dealt with were fundamentally religious.11
Unfortunately, the liberal churches were wedded to this psychotherapeutic revolution from its beginning; thus the development of the second circle, liberal pastoral theology. In their abandonment of biblical truth and authority, leaders within these churches looked to the social sciences to provide authority and efficacy. Harry Emerson Fosdick, whose theological liberalism was one trip wire for the fundamentalist-modernist splits of the 1920s, was, not by coincidence, simultaneously a leader in the mental hygiene movement. Using his pulpit to expound a new psychotherapeutic version of Christianity, his psychologism was the flip side of his unbelief in the “fundamentals.” The very idea of pastoral counseling was defined by liberal theology’s integration of secular psychologists, especially Carl Rogers and Alfred Adler, from World War I into the 1960s.
In general, conservative Christians simply did not talk or write about counseling.12 And when they did begin to think about and practice counseling, they adopted the powerful paradigms of the encircling secular psychologies and liberal pastoral theologies. The presuppositions for both practice and thought were neither exposed by nor subjected to biblical analysis. There was no attempt to build a biblical practical theology of counseling from the ground up. The big circle of secular psychology and psychotherapy was always the dominant partner in the discussions. Meanwhile, the middle-sized circle, an implicitly or explicitly liberal theology, was always tugging at evangelical thought and practice. Fuller Theological Seminary’s Graduate School of Psychology (founded in 1965) exemplified the hold secular and liberalizing paradigms had on professing Bible-believers.13
THE REDISCOVERY OF BIBLICAL COUNSELING
Godly people, wise and experienced in living the Word, have applied God’s Word to the problems of life in all times and places. In this sense, wherever wise Christians have sought to encourage and admonish one another, biblical counseling has occurred. Although truths that are not systematized are jeopardized, it is to God’s praise that informal wisdom has always operated. God has always enabled wise pastors to approach their people with love and patience, and to open their Bibles to the right places to “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” In spite of the fact that the systematic approaches to counseling recorded in books and taught in classrooms during the twentieth century have not been biblically based, there has been a rediscovery of biblical counseling. From the human point of view, that rediscovery is linked primarily to the life and efforts of one man: Jay E. Adams. He began to see, discuss, and do counseling in ways that he and others had not been seeing, discussing, or doing previously.
Jay Adams (born 1929) grew up in Baltimore, the only child of a policeman and a secretary. Converted to Christ in high school, he obtained a Bachelor of Divinity from Reformed Episcopal Seminary (Philadelphia) and a Bachelor of Arts in classics from Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) in 1952. Adams served as an area director of Youth for Christ in the early 1950s, was ordained in 1952, and over the next thirteen years pastored several Presbyterian congregations. He also received a Masters in Sacred Theology from Temple University (Philadelphia) in 1958 and a Ph.D. in speech from the University of Missouri in 1969. Bible, theology, Greek, and preaching formed the heart of his education. But as a pastor, the problems of people’s lives continually troubled and weighed on him. “It bothered Jay so much during those years that he never could help people with their problems. He’d say, ‘Psychology is just as bad as the liberals. It isn’t right and doesn’t work. But how do you really help people?’ ”14
Adams continually sought to upgrade his counseling skills. He read voraciously from all three circles of counseling: the leading twentieth-century psychologists, the standard works in pastoral counseling (which mediated Carl Rogers through liberal or neo-orthodox theology), and Clyde Narramore and other evangelicals who had begun to publish from either a Freudian or an eclectic point of view. While at Temple, he took two courses in counseling with a psychiatrist of Freudian bent.15 Adams was disappointed and frustrated with this training. Indeed, he felt it was full of theory-driven speculations, was ineffective in practice, and was contrary to basic biblical truths. The approaches offered did not make sense of people, they did not help people, and they were overtly unbiblical. He had no coherent alternative, but muddled along doing what little he could in pastoral counseling situations. Workshops for pastors, which were regularly sponsored by mental health agencies, reiterated the litany that the pastor should not attempt much but should “defer and refer” to secular mental health experts. The bottom line message to pastors was, “Leave things to the professionals. There is little you can do besides provide an accepting atmosphere for people. Troubled people are not violators of conscience but morally neutral victims of an accusing conscience. They need professional help. Pastors shouldn’t do more than refer.”16 Such propaganda was intimidating to thousands of conservative pastors.
In 1963, Adams was invited to teach practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. His responsibilities focused on preaching, but included a course in pastoral theology that contained a segment on pastoral counseling. This course raised the stakes. What should he teach? Adams happened to hear of psychologist O. Hobart Mowrer and went to hear him speak. That speech, Mowrer’s book The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion, (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961), and a six-week intensive course with Mowrer that summer had a catalytic effect on Adams. Mowrer “cleared the field of rubble for me. He destroyed Freud, which was the reigning system, and he shook up faith in mental health professionals. His positive system was completely unbiblical, but he gave me the confidence to go forward.”17 Mowrer shook loose the death grip of secular propaganda. This freed Adams to challenge the reigning psychological orthodoxy and to follow his nose biblically. As a result, Adams did intensive Bible study about the conscience, guilt, anthropology, and change. He described the next two years as “night and day, counseling and studying: studying people, studying counseling books, studying the Bible.”18
Adams’ first rough outline of biblical counseling began to emerge during that small segment of the pastoral theology course. At first it was little more than “sin is the problem, the Bible has the answers,” incorporating a few case studies. Problems were addressed on an ad hoc basis as they arose in counseling or from a study of Scripture. But by 1967 Adams’ thinking about counseling had jelled into a system, and he expanded the counseling segment of the theology course into a counseling course. Then when he published his first book in 1970, Adams’ personal rediscovery of biblical counseling initiated a widespread rediscovery for the entire church.
Adams has written prolifically to create and develop a system of biblical counseling. He considers four of his books to be basic texts. Competent to Counsel, his first book, dropped a bombshell on the conservative Christian world. It was both polemical and positive. The polemics attacked the preeminence of pagan psychology and psychiatry in the field of counseling, and the positive methods set forth an ideal of “nouthetic confrontation.”19 Adams saw the Bible’s way of counseling as radically dependent on the work of the Holy Spirit to apply the Word of God to people’s lives: the promises encourage and empower, the commands convict and guide, and the stories make application. The Bible calls for human counselors to be frank, loving, humble about their own failings, and change-oriented. They are to be servants of the Holy Spirit’s agenda, not autonomous professionals or gurus. In Adams’ shorthand, nouthetic counseling is confrontation that is done out of concern for the purposes of changing something God wants to change.20 That something can involve attitudes, beliefs, behavior, motives, decisions, and so forth.
Adams’ second book, The Christian Counselor’s Manual, fine-tuned the philosophy of biblical counseling and provided counseling methods, including a discussion on how to understand and solve particular problems. A third book, Lectures on Counseling, brought together a number of essays on foundational topics, and a fourth book, More Than Redemption (republished as A Theology of Christian Counseling), expanded the systematic base of biblical counseling.
Throughout his prolific written works, Adams challenged biblical counselors not to fall prey to rigid ways of thinking or to mechanical techniques. He insisted that counselors must do justice both to the fundamental commonalities and to the diverse particulars of counseling situations and life situations.
“Insight into the inner workings of sinful human beings, into their outer circumstances and problems, and into the correct meaning and applicability of appropriate Bible passages is absolutely essential to counseling. Likewise, the importance of creativity cannot be minimized. It is creativity that particularizes the common, fitting together the usual and the unusual in each situation. Without it, people are crammed into molds they don’t fit; rather, the truth must be adapted and applied (but not accommodated) to each person as he is.”21
Not only did Adams write abundant resources for the development of biblical counseling, but he also pioneered settings where biblical counseling was the modus operandi and agenda. As noted above, his first rudimentary courses in biblical counseling took place at Westminster Theological Seminary in the mid-1960s. Though Adams left Westminster in 1976 to devote himself to research and writing, the program continued to develop under the leadership of Adams’ colleague, John Bettler. A residential Doctor of Ministry in Counseling was begun in 1980 with a dozen courses offered in biblical counseling. When the residential program was replaced by a modular program, most of the courses migrated into the regular Westminster curriculum as electives. A Master of Arts and Religion with a counseling major was begun in 1984.22
Adams was concerned for pastors, even more than for students who might one day become pastors. He felt pastors needed a site where counseling was taking place, where they could learn to counsel and then return to their congregations and communities. Thus in 1967, Adams and several associates made plans to develop a counseling center that would offer both counseling and a place for pastors to observe and train. These plans crystallized in 1968 when Adams and John Bettler began the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (CCEF) in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. Counseling was offered to needy people, and education was offered to would-be helpers of needy people. During the first course, trainees sat in on counseling sessions during the day and evening and then discussed cases over supper. In 1974, John Bettler became CCEF’s director and first full-time employee. As CCEF continued to grow, counseling sites were opened in San Diego, California, and at several places in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The CCEF faculty currently teaches courses at Westminster Theological Seminary and Biblical Theological Seminary.23
As biblical-nouthetic counseling gained adherents, the need for a professional association became evident. Concerns for the growing group of practitioners included certification for biblical counselors, accountability for standards of biblical commitment and ethics, fellowship and interaction among biblical counselors, ongoing in-service training, and protection from lawsuits. To meet these and other needs, Adams joined with several men to found the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors (NANC) in 1976. Today, NANC publishes a quarterly newsletter, The Biblical Counselor, and coordinates a large annual conference.24
Adams also wanted a forum where ideas could be shared and discussed, and where writers could try their wings. So in 1977 he founded The Journal of Pastoral Practice, published through CCEF. As JPP’s editor for the next fifteen years, his purpose was to develop a journal that would adhere to scholarly standards but would be “intensely practical” and would meet “the needs of men serving in the pastoral ministry.”25 This journal embodied a unique vision in at least three respects. First, counseling was not isolated from the rest of pastoral practice: preaching, Christian education, missions, worship, and evangelism. The mere act of embedding private ministry in the context of a comprehensive vision counteracts the common vision of counseling as discrete from the rest of the ministry of the Word of God. Second, the counseling articles (and counseling articles always constituted the bulk of the journal’s contents) took a distinctively biblical point of view. Third, the journal sought to be practical. It sought to address and influence practice, not simply theology or theory. In 1992 the name of the journal was changed to The Journal of Biblical Counseling. The concern to meet the needs of pastors has continued but has broadened to include the needs of trained laypeople who seek to counsel biblically.26
Jay Adams, his writings, and the institutions he founded have led to a proliferation of biblical counseling ministries and training centers both in the United States and abroad. For example, a growing ministry for training laypeople grew out of lectures Adams gave in Washington, D.C. (1973) when John Broger, a Christian layman active in ministry in the Pentagon, had a deep concern that discipleship address and solve the counseling issues in people’s lives. He took Adams’s materials and in 1974 founded the Biblical Counseling Foundation (BCF), which continues to grow as a ministry that trains laypeople and pastors in discipleship methods largely flavored by biblical counseling.27
Various local churches have founded biblical counseling ministries, taking many different forms: formal or informal, pastor or lay, focusing on congregational needs or reaching out to the community. Particularly noteworthy is Faith Baptist Church in Lafayette, Indiana. This church has founded a thriving counseling center and built church life around the concepts of progressive sanctification and mutual counsel that are at the heart of biblical counseling. Faith Baptist Counseling Ministries (FBCM) was started in 1977 by Rev. Bill Goode and Dr. Bob Smith. It has grown to offer training throughout the Midwest. Randy Patton is the executive director of NANC, and FBCM has served as the location for the NANC offices. Faith Baptist Church has hosted the NANC national conference several times in recent years.28
The biblical counseling agenda has also become established in The Master’s College (www.masters.edu) and The Master’s Seminary (www.tms.edu) in California. In the late 1980s, John MacArthur and his co-laborers turned their attention closely to the issues of biblical counseling and secular psychology. They restructured the curriculum at both undergraduate and seminary levels to reflect a commitment to use biblical truth to explain people’s needs and to offer them help. Two of Jay Adams’ longstanding associates, Bob Smith (from FBCM) and Wayne Mack (from CCEF) have been instrumental in designing and building the program.29
The notion of doing distinctively biblical counseling has also been planted in a number of countries around the world. Whenever and wherever Christians counsel wisely in obedience to the Scriptures, biblical counseling happens, whether it is so titled or not. But it is a great advantage to identify self-consciously what one aims to do and to rally like-minded believers to the cause. For this reason, there are nascent biblical counseling movements in Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, and South Africa, taking the form of associations and/or counseling and training centers.
QUESTIONS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
One of the results of tracing the rediscovery of biblical counseling has been the challenge to think towards the future. Church history bears testimony to the uncertain fortunes of ministries and movements. Some thrive. Some miscarry early on. Some grow, then collapse. Some prosper awhile and then stagnate. Some go soft and drift into compromise. Some go the other way, becoming sectarian and self-righteous. Some are renewed when things look bleak. Some go off the tracks into error or irrelevancy. How can biblical counseling continue to grow in wisdom and stature as it faces the challenges of the future? Without doubt, the biblical counseling movement faces three fundamental tasks at the beginning of the twernty-first century: (1) the task of defining, (2) the task of edifying, and (3) the task of evangelizing.
How will biblical counseling be defined? A creedal circle needs to be drawn delineating the boundaries of a biblical counseling confession of faith and practice. What commitments and practices mark one as a biblical counselor? What commitments and practices mark one as some other sort of counselor? Why does this next decade demand creedal development? Defining the boundaries is important for three reasons.
First, through the first twenty-five years of development, Jay Adams’s personal influence and his network of friendships provided a rough guide to the definition of biblical counseling. But the movement is growing rapidly, and the next generation will not necessarily know Jay Adams personally. The content of an allegiance to the biblical counseling vision and cause must be more precisely defined. Creedal definition and consolidation is a necessary phase of any healthy movement of reformation in the church.
Second, the integration movement of Christian psychotherapists increasingly employs the adjective “biblical” and calls for theological renewal within their point of view. While we applaud any genuine increase of biblical consciousness and practice among integrationists, it remains to be seen whether the increase in Bible talk, God talk, and Jesus talk represents a substantive shift. In the meantime, the higher degree of verbal similarity between integrationist and biblical counseling has the potential to confuse many. Defining core biblical commitments will help weed out the theories and practices that claim to be biblical but deviate substantively from the Bible’s teachings about people, about change, and about ministry.
Third, the biblical counseling movement from the beginning has pulled together an otherwise diverse group of Christians. We have never been monolithic, but have embraced Bible-believers of many shades: reformed, fundamentalist, and evangelical. The founders and developers of biblical counseling have held diverse opinions on many specific counseling issues, as well as wider theological issues. What has held the movement together has been the judgment that these differences were secondary differences of application or emphasis, not matters of core commitment. Nailing down the primary areas of agreement becomes increasingly important as the movement expands. One way to phrase the boundary question is, “What is the size of the teapot within which there are allowable tempests?” Defining primary areas of agreement creates the freedom for the iron-sharpening-iron discussion of differences. The alternatives are either fragmentation or drift.
What are the common commitments? What are the rudiments of biblical counseling? Every reader of the Scriptures and of Adams’s efforts to systematize the Scriptures would generate a slightly different list. Here we will highlight seven core elements that Adams rediscovered, articulated, and defended.
1. God is at the center of counseling. God is sovereign, active, speaking, merciful, commanding, and powerful. The Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, is the central focus of counseling and the exemplar of the Wonderful Counselor. The Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit are foundational to all significant and lasting life change. The Word of God is about counseling, giving both understanding of people and methods of ministering to people. The Bible is authoritative, relevant, and comprehensively sufficient for counseling. God has spoken truly to every basic issue of human nature and to the problems in living. His Word establishes the goal of counseling, how people can change, the role of the counselor, counseling methods, and so forth. Christians have the only authoritative source for counseling wisdom: the Holy Spirit speaking through the Word of God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom is the only worthy goal of counseling.
2. Commitment to God has epistemological consequences. First, other sources of knowledge must be submitted to the authority of Scripture. The sciences, personal experience, literature, and so forth may be useful, but may not play a constitutive role in counseling. Second, there is a conflict of counsel built into human life. Genesis 3, Psalm 1, and Jeremiah 23 are paradigmatic. Counsel that contradicts God’s counsel has existed since the garden of Eden, challenging God’s counsel and building from other presuppositions and towards other goals. Such false counsel must be noted and opposed. Specifically, in our time and place, secular psychology has intruded into the domain of biblical truth and practice. Secular theories and therapies substitute for biblical wisdom and deceive people both inside and outside the church. The false claimants to authority must be exposed and opposed.
3. Sin, in all its dimensions (for example, both motive and behavior; both the sins we do and the sins done against us; both the consequences of personal sin and the consequences of Adam’s sin) is the primary problem counselors must deal with. Sin includes wrong behavior, distorted thinking, an orientation to follow personal desires, and bad attitudes. Sin is habitual and deceptive, and much of the difficulty of counseling consists in bringing specific sin to awareness and breaking its hold. The problems in living that necessitate counseling are not matters of unmet psychological needs, indwelling demons of sin, poor socialization, inborn temperament, genetic predisposition, or anything else that removes attention from the responsible human being. The problem in believers is remnant sin; the problem in unbelievers is reigning sin. Sin is the problem.
4. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer. Forgiveness for sin and power to change into Christ’s image are the greatest needs of mankind. The orthodox gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer to the problem. Christ deals with sin: the guilt, the power, the deception, and the misery of sin. He was crucified for sinners, He reigns over hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit, and He will return to complete the redemption of His people from their sins and sufferings. These core truths must infuse the counseling process.
5. The biblical change process which counseling must aim at is progressive sanctification. While there are many ways of changing people, biblical counseling aims for nothing less than transformation into the image of Jesus Christ amid the rough and tumble of daily life. Change is not instantaneous, but progresses throughout life. This progressive view of sanctification has many implications. For example, the process of change is only metaphorically, not actually, healing. The metaphor is meant to capture the process of sanctification: ongoing repentance, renewal of mind unto biblical truth, and obedience in the power of the Spirit.
6. The situational difficulties people face are not the random cause of problems in living. These difficulties operate within the sovereign design of God. They are the context in which hearts are revealed, and faith and obedience are purified through the battle between the Spirit and the flesh. Influential aspects of one’s life situation do not cause sin. Heredity, temperament, personality, culture, oppression and evil, bereavement, handicaps, old age, Satan, physical illness, and so forth are significant for counseling, but are not ultimately causative of sin.
7. Counseling is fundamentally a pastoral activity and must be church-based. It must be regulated under the authority of God’s appointed under-shepherds. Counseling is connected both structurally and in content to other aspects of the pastoral task: teaching, preaching, prayer, church discipline, use of gifts, missions, worship, and so forth. Counseling is the private ministry of the Word of God, tailored specifically to the individuals involved. The differences between preaching and counseling are not conceptual but only methodological. The same truths are applied in diverse ways.
These seven commitments have unified the biblical counseling movement. They have provided a framework within which many secondary differences of Bible interpretation, of theological commitment, of setting for counseling, of personality have been able to exist constructively rather than destructively. But there are numerous other issues that demand clear biblical thinking and firm commitment: the place of the past, the place of feelings, the biblical view of human motivation, the relationship of biblical truth to secular psychology, the place of suffering, how to apply various aspects of biblical truth and methods of biblical ministry to different kinds of problems, etc. Will biblical counselors draw the boundaries in the right places? Or will the lines be drawn too narrowly, creating a sectarian party spirit? Or will the lines be drawn too widely, inviting compromise and drift? Only within properly drawn creedal boundaries can energies for edification and evangelization be guided and released.
How will biblical counselors develop greater skill in the cure of souls? How will we become wiser practitioners, thinkers, apologists, and Christian men and women? The task of edifying biblical counselors demands advances that are both exegetically sound and case-tried. It demands that we think well about many issues. One of the often ignored aspects of Jay Adams’ work has been his repeated observation that his work is a starting place, and that much work remains to be done to build on the foundation.
Biblical counseling has been rediscovered. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that the idea of biblical counseling and the call to do biblical counseling have been rediscovered. This has brought into focus many fresh discoveries and new insights into the cure of souls. For example, the concern to specify counseling methodology (such as techniques of asking questions, building relationships, setting goals, speaking the truth, and using homework) has produced helpful developments. And the concern to translate general biblical truths into a specific renewal of both inward and outward life (Rom. 13:12–14), tailor-made both to the counselee and the life situation, is refreshingly new. Will biblical counseling continue to develop intellectually and practically?30 Or will we stagnate and turn yesterday’s breakthroughs into tomorrow’s formulaic-truisms and techniques?
How will biblical counselors propagate the cause of biblical counseling? The task of persuasion must be undertaken with three distinct groups of people: (1) the great bulk of the believing church, both in the United States and internationally; (2) the integrationist community here in the United States and abroad; and (3) the members of the secular psychological culture. Many people remain ignorant of the existence of biblical counseling, while others dismiss it on the basis of a caricature that bears no resemblance to anything the Bible teaches or anything wise counselors think and do. Biblical counseling needs evangelists and apologists with sensitivities and passions for each of these communities. We have answers people need; answers that are better than those they already have. Biblical counselors must think well, pray pointedly, and discuss actively to develop energetic and creative apologetic and evangelistic efforts to help people find these answers.