In this episode, pastors Derek and Cliff discuss the founding of the biblical counseling movement and what it means for pastors and Christian counselors.
Transcript
Derek: Welcome to With All Wisdom, where we are applying biblical truths to everyday life. My name is Derek Brown and I’m pastor and elder at Creekside Bible Church in Cupertino, California and I’m here today with Cliff McManis. He is pastor teacher at Creekside Bible Church and we are both professors of theology at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary just north of us in Vallejo and we want to follow up with our last discussion on biblical counseling. We are just talking about the history of psychology and helping Christians discern the movement and apply Colossians chapter two and to see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit and we hope that this has been helpful.
And before we jump back into our topic, I’m going to hand it over to Cliff, but before I do, I want to encourage you to check out WithAllWisdom.org where we have a large and growing collection of articles and audio resources like this one to help you grow in the faith, rooting everything in God’s word, being careful not to root things in man’s wisdom but in God’s wisdom because that is what is ultimately and eternally beneficial for us and brings glory to God. So, Cliff, I want to turn it back to you because you had some thoughts based on what we talked about last time in the last episode, so why don’t you take it away.
Cliff: Yeah, you gave that survey of the history of the care of the soul, first of all, which included the Christian church, actually even Old Testament history, which is true. You said that humans have been concerned about the care of the soul from the very beginning, which makes sense because in Genesis when it says that God created Adam, he took dust from the earth and then he breathed (nephesh) into his nostrils and he became a living soul. There it is. The soul in the Old and New Testament from a biblical point of view speaks of the inner person and all that that entails, not apart from our body because we’re a unified being of body and soul, not a technical dichotomy but a unified physical incarnate spirit and soul and so that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about psychology, care of the soul is care of the inner man and all that that entails, which would be, as you’ve mentioned, our rational components, our psychology, our spirit, our will, our volition, our emotions, our perceptions, and all that goes with that. So we are soulish creatures made in the image of God and so that was a good history and a good reminder that the Bible talks about care of the soul from a biblical point of view in the Old Testament.
The psalmist speaks of his soul and preaches to his own self, his own soul, and then in the New Testament is even more detailed about the soul, the care of the soul, and the master who created the soul is God himself, He’s the creator, He knows best about the soul, He knows the proper diagnosis, He knows the solutions to the problems of our soul, He’s the only one that can really settle and heal our soul.
So that’s why it’s so important to have a biblical point of view and then you did the history of the origins of modern day psychology and that was a really good point because I think to summarize what you said, that as a discipline today, I mean as a young person, you’re 19 and you want to major in psychology and you could even be a Christian and having this desire. I know Christians who did that very thing or maybe you’re not a Christian and you just, oh, well, see, what do you want to major in? Business or, and you pick all these disciplines, no, just I’ll pick, oh, psychology, that looks good, and you go to the university and it really doesn’t matter if it’s a Christian university or a secular one, but if you’re majoring in psychology, typically it’s going to be a secular university and you’re thinking probably is that, oh, psychology, it’s a discipline like every other discipline and has been around forever when the fact is from the history you gave, it hasn’t. That was one thing that jumped out is the discipline of psychology as we know it is a very recent development.
Derek: Right. Yeah. Modern psychology is…
Cliff: Modern psychology and even some of the movers and shakers of it, you mentioned Freud, that’s only 120 years. So it’s recent, it’s novel, it’s radically changed since it started a hundred years ago.
Derek: It’s true. I didn’t mention that, but there’s…
Cliff: I mean, it keeps morphing.
Derek: Exactly.
Cliff: They can’t get the story straight of what they want to believe or emphasize.
Derek: That’s right. That’s a good point.
Cliff: So it is not constant, it’s not reliable, keeps changing, it is recent, it doesn’t have a history. The roots of it, as you pointed out, flow out of the Enlightenment, which that word enlighten to help people, you know, because some people who aren’t good at history, just think of the word the Enlightenment. What’s that? Well, the idea of this knowledge and the Enlightenment thinkers were antithetical, like you said, to Christianity, to tradition of religion, to the authority of the church, to pastors, to divine revelation, to special revelation. They were pretty much anti-miracles. It’s enlightened. And the whole idea of enlightened is the light goes on and we’re enlightened. We’re enlightened thinkers. We know what we’re talking about. We’re smarter than everybody else. And so an enlightened thinker from the Enlightenment literally thought they could answer all the questions of the universe with their own autonomous, unaided, fallen, finite human reason. How arrogant is that? But that was true. You mentioned several of them, significant Enlightenment thinkers. I don’t need God. I don’t need the Bible. I don’t need the church and tradition. I can think all of this out on my own. That’s enlightenment because I am enlightened. My reason isn’t fallen. They don’t even think of those terms. The sky’s the limit in terms of my reason. So huge emphasis. And then that just, like you pointed out, just gave birth to all kinds of false teachings and things to compete in ideologies and worldviews that compete with Christianity, basically the Christian worldview.
Derek: That’s right.
Cliff: So today we have things like psychology, evolution that are some of the largest worldviews in the world today that 400 years ago they didn’t even exist. Sociology is another one. If you wanted to major in sociology, psychology, or biological Darwinian evolution 400 years ago, you couldn’t do it because it didn’t exist. So these are all recent manifestations o the pride of man in their foolishness of how they think. So just that recent aspect of it, people need to understand the historical context. And then another thing that you were highlighting that I thought important is that here we have the fruits, which is modern day psychology and these principles that supposedly you can learn and are helpful to you and solve your problems.
Derek: Right.
Cliff: That’s the fruit. I want to look at the root of it. What’s the root of this ideology or this idea or modern psychology? And you pointed that out. So where did it come from? What’s the origin of it? We always need to look at that. A lot of times Christians don’t do that. But you and I would say, no, that’s why you have to have a worldview. You have to look at presuppositions of what people think, their fundamental settled convictions of their thoughts about the reality of the world or what’s their theology. And that’s what we need to do with psychology. Who were the movers and shakers? Who started this movement? What did they believe? Sigmund Freud was probably one of the most well-known ones. You read a biography of that guy. It’s horrendous.
Derek: It is horrendous.
Cliff: He grew up as a Jewish person, abandoned his Jewish faith, became not just an atheist, but an overt hostile atheist who attacked Christianity and the Bible.
Derek: I have a quote from a historian regarding Freud, just to your point. It says, there’s no clear representative of the final flowering of the secular prophets than Freudian psychology. Freud’s treatment of the neurotic character of religion brought the tradition of the secular prophets to its most aggressive criticism of Christian belief.
Cliff: Yes.
Derek: To your point.
Cliff: Aggressive. Because I’ve read some of Freud’s stuff, and he is just overt in attacking the Bible, attacking the God of Christianity. I mean, he literally hated God and Christians in the Bible. Hatred. A visceral, guttural hatred. And then he comes up with his science that isn’t science at all. It’s actually the way you described it. Modern day psychology is a counterfeit, and it’s an imposter. And one of Freud’s goals was to supplant Christianity, really, to displace it. And that’s what it’s proven to be. So people need to know that. And so when you think of the word psychology, and you’re talking to a fellow Christian, and you went, oh, okay, so you want to pursue psychology. You want some psychology. So you want care of the soul is what you want. You want somebody to care for your soul.
Derek: Right.
Cliff: Well, yes, I do. Okay, well, that’s legitimate.
Derek: Right.
Cliff: Okay, well, what are your options? Let’s see. You can have God or Jesus take care of your soul in the church, or you can have, how about Sigmund Freud, the God-hating atheist who despised Christianity? Do you want him to take care of your soul? Really? You’re going to entrust your eternal soul to that guy?
Derek: Right.
Cliff: That’s really what you’re doing.
Derek: Right.
Cliff: And Christians need to think that way and be discerning. And then the last thought I had as you were talking was just this naturalistic presupposition they have. Again, just to emphasize, naturalism, just think the opposite of naturalism is supernatural. So they just rejected the supernatural. It means they reject miracles. They reject the Bible. They reject God. And everything can be explained away on a natural level from the phenomena of this world from a human point of view. And none of them agree as time goes by. They just continue to contradict one another. And here, you know, the skeptics of the Bible and Christianity, you know, one of their common arguments is, oh, the Bible’s got so many errors, or it contradicts itself. Take psychology and the history of psychology and just read the psychologists, the big name ones like you were mentioning from Maslow to Skinner to Freud to modern-day psychologists. They all categorically contradict one another. They can’t even agree.
Derek: Right. I mean, much of Freud’s work has been rejected by the more contemporary psychologists.
Cliff: Yes. And as well as, as a matter of fact, Darwin is actually embarrassing to the scientific community today in light of molecular science and all the stuff he was not aware of back in 1859. So they just kind of give him lip service. Oh, yeah, good stuff. But they don’t want to talk about his details because it’s completely unscientific.
Derek: Yeah. So what you come to, so thank you for all that helpful clarification. That was good. And as we were talking through it last time, we basically came to post-Civil War, the post-Civil War situation in America, where the psychological establishment is being seen as the ones who will provide soul care. And you see a growing drift towards that kind of thinking. And as we saw David Powlison describe it as a secular pastorate, which I thought was very insightful, you either have these pastors, these secular pastors care for your soul or you have Christian pastors care for your soul.
Cliff: Can I stop you on that one?
Derek: Sure.
Cliff: Because that one is probably the biggest problem I have or the contention with modern-day psychology. I mean, that’s why I used the word pseudo and then also imposter. Because I think this is a tool of Satan, more than just about anything else, to use modern-day psychology to get Christians to believe that there’s this special scientific knowledge that somebody has outside the church and outside your pastor. In other words, the Bible’s not sufficient and your pastor’s not sufficient. And yeah, I got problems and I get help from my pastor on some of my problems, but the big problem is, oh, I don’t go to the pastor. The elders, they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve got to go to a specialist or a therapist or a psychotherapist or the psychologist because he has answers. He can really care for my soul.
Derek: Right. He handles the serious problems.
Cliff: He can fix my soul. My pastor, he cares about my soul, but my psychologist, he can fix my soul.
Derek: And that is one of the arguments that Christian integration is now. And integration is to someone who says, we should take Christianity and psychology and take the best of psychology and blend it with Christianity and they should work together. And they will make that argument. They will say, hey, we’re not saying the Bible isn’t wonderful and it’s not God’s word. Yes, but there are just certain serious issues that must be the sole issues that must be taken care of by the psychologist. And so there are some who have bought into that whole idea. So you see this dichotomy forming. And unfortunately, you don’t see the church, at least conservative, theologically conservative Christians, you don’t see a strong response, really. You kind of even see a reluctance or a resigning to this, kind of handing it over, as it were, to the psychologists. By 1955, believing Protestants had no major comprehensive models of counseling. I’m now drawing from David Powlison’s historic work on this issue. This is 1955. He writes, quote, theological conservatives had no educational programs to train pastors and other Christian workers in the face-to-face cure of souls. Christian bookstores contained no books on the problems of everyday life and processes of change. No evangelical, fundamentalist, Pentecostal, or reformed leaders, this is 1955, were known for their skill in probing, changing, and reconciling troubled and troublesome people. Knowledge and skill, this is so key, knowledge and skill to conduct patient probing remedial conversation became the province of secularists and liberals. Theological liberals were already embracing the so-called discoveries of psychology in using them in the care of souls. That would make sense within a kind of theologically liberal worldview, where you are already loose on the authority of scripture and more ready to embrace these kinds of worldviews and these kinds of philosophies. So this is 1955. Beginning right around that same time, you start to see a little bit of development among conservative Christians in terms of at least engaging the issue of psychology or bringing it in as a useful tool. So there used to be in 1954 a radio show by a Christian named Clyde Narramore called Psychology for Living. And then in 1965 a man named Paul Tournier, who is a Freudian psychologist who converted to Christ and wrote on psychology from a Christian perspective.
And then you have the Rosemead School of Psychology down at Biola that was developed in 1968. And then they developed the Journal of Psychology and Theology in 1975 and renamed it Psychology and Christianity in 1982. So you have this development, this engagement, but no real strong response against psychology as though it were something to be concerned about.
Cliff: So when you refer to Biola’s School of Psychology, are you saying at that point they’re not resisting it, but they’re pretty much welcoming it, assimilating it into their curriculum worldview?
Derek: Exactly.
Cliff: Which is not a good thing.
Derek: I would say no.
Cliff: Yeah, I agree.
Derek: It’s a viewing it as a useful tool, as a legitimate area of study. Rosemead, that’s 1968. Well, around that same time a man, Jay Adams, was pastoring at a church and he has a crisis. He has a crisis moment that he talks about in his book, Competent to Counsel. You already know I’m talking about Jay Adams. And he writes Competent to Counsel in 1970. And in that book he wrote this, he said, quote, early in my first pastorate, following an evening service, a man lingered after everyone else had left. I chatted with him awkwardly, wondering what he wanted. He broke into tears but could not speak. I simply did not know what to do. I was helpless. He went home that night without unburdening his heart or receiving any genuine help from his pastor. Less than one month later he died. I now suspect that his doctor had told him of his impending death and he had come to me for counsel, but I had failed him. That night I asked God for help to become an effective counselor. And it was from that point on that he dove headlong into all the psychological literature looking for help. And he discovered that there wasn’t any help to be had. But not only that, but what he was seeing in these books, these psychological books, was that the cure of souls were coming from a perspective that clearly contradicted what scripture taught about humanity, our nature, how we’re made, the source of our problems, how to define our problems, and so on. So he’s getting little help from these things and realizing that they are contradicting the Bible left and right and coming from a completely different worldview than the one that the Bible would present. And so this then forces him in to start to really think about the care of souls from a biblical perspective. And you could say that this is now the birth of the biblical counseling movement because then he takes off writing like a machine. He forms his own journal, and he calls his approach Nouthetic counseling. And we talked about that word already. That just comes from Romans 15. Well, it’s also used throughout the New Testament. It can mean admonish, exhort. It’s speaking truth to the mind, as I think you defined it, Cliff. And so Jay Adams is wanting now to reclaim the care of souls from a distinctively Christian biblical perspective. And so he gets to work, and he produces just a massive amount of material and really does begin a movement.
And almost in a way similar. Now, I’ve heard people kind of make fun of this analogy, but I think it’s a fine analogy. Almost a kind of reformation, you could say, in the care of souls. So the reformation in the 16th century had to do with the sufficiency of Scripture with regard to church tradition. And in the 1970s, you had a reformation of the sufficiency of Scripture with regard to caring for the soul. And since then, you’ve had people, Jay Adams has since went to heaven. He’s recently died. But many people picked up this movement and were wanting to reclaim the care of souls from a biblical perspective. They saw what he was writing was true and valuable. And his books are exceedingly biblical. They’re exceedingly practical. I just finished the Christian Counselor’s Manual, and he begins with some great theology and history and working through things. But then in the latter part, giving very practical, this is how you counsel anger. This is how you counsel marriage problems. And it’s just one thing right after the other, very useful biblical counsel. But this is the beginning of the biblical counseling movement.
Cliff: Can I just comment on something you said there on Jay Adams, just so people know, was he in a position to criticize psychology in modern-day psychiatry? Some people might say, well, no, he wasn’t. Well, actually, he was. If you read his biography and see what he did, he actually formerly studied psychology, formerly studied psychiatry. He even actually was working at hospitals and psychiatric units, working alongside in the shadow of a non-believing psychologist who was world-renowned, kind of as his understudy for observation. So he knew what he was talking about.
Derek: Exactly. That’s an important point because sometimes he gets written off by certain Christian psychologists as being obtuse and not really knowing what he’s talking about. And that is the furthest from the truth. If you give a really careful attention to what he has written, it is profound, it is insightful, and he clearly understands psychology and the psychologists that he’s talking about, which is, I think, in God’s providence, what made him such an effective figure in this whole movement, because he could critique psychology, modern psychology, from the inside, really understanding it, really knowing it, and showing very clearly where it was defective, deficient, and just downright evil in some places, and how it was, at the end of the day, could not provide what scripture, what Christ provides for the soul, for the person and their problems. And so, yes, just again to reaffirm Jay Adams and the usefulness of all of that, he’s written, I always find help from him, and his organization, the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation, he founded that in 1968. That still is active today. You have other gentlemen who are now running that. David Powlison is one. He recently died. Ed Welch is another very helpful resource. But just carrying on this movement of effective biblical counseling, arguing for the sufficiency of scripture as a methodology towards people and their problems, demonstrating the richness of scripture. And this is an important piece, too, because as we think as I’ve thought about the question of integrationism, integrating psychology and Christianity, I have yet to find an integrationist who has, in his kind of developing a theology of counseling, or developing a theology of psychology, or however you want, whatever you want to call it, I have yet to find one who goes through scripture rigorously and comprehensively and exhaustively to say, this is all that scripture says about counseling. And then goes on to describe how they’re going to do things. I’ve yet to find anyone to do that. Because what I think is happening is that there’s just an assumption that scripture is not sufficient for the counseling task.
We live in this kind of post-enlightenment worldview where there’s this idea that we’re primarily material, there’s not this soul-body dichotomy, and therefore real serious problems are defined medically, they’re defined biologically. And so Christian pastors, they can help in a kind of narrow devotional kind of area, but if you really want help, you go to the expert, the soul expert, the psychological expert. And there’s just this assumption by integration is that the scripture just isn’t sufficient. And so we’re going to begin our methodology that way without really diving into the scripture to see how profoundly rich it is and how it does answer all the problems that people deal with. I just took our young professionals through just the fruit of the Spirit to show them how when people are going to counseling, secular counselors looking for help, they’re looking for help because they lack the fruit of the Spirit, right? Their relationships are a mess because they lack love. Their life is a mess because they lack self-control, and they’re addicted to substances and addicted to all kinds of things. Their relationships are in trouble because they lack gentleness. And people are depressed because they don’t understand their purpose in life. They don’t understand their relation to God and how God has made them.
Cliff: They’re overwhelmed with anxiety because they don’t have peace and joy.
Derek: Exactly.
Cliff: That’s one of the big ones.
Derek: Exactly. But that’s just a very small piece of scripture, but yet speaks very profoundly to the very problems that people are facing in counseling. Unfortunately, when you go to counseling, you have your problems redefined and relabeled for you so they no longer resemble what scripture is teaching. And there’s this kind of clever divide just implicitly created between your problems and the Bible that psychology is placed there. I call it clever because it is subtle. If you can rename and relabel things in a kind of naturalistic framework, then you can start to believe, oh yeah, the Bible doesn’t speak to those things. The experts know about these things. They know the labels, they know the words, they know the terms. I need to go to them, but scripture doesn’t speak to them. And so my goal has been to let’s first, even before we talk about anything else, let’s talk about what does scripture say about the counseling task. And my goodness, that study has been rewarding because it says so much.
Cliff: Yeah, it’s hard to amend everything you’re saying, but it continues to be very frustrating as a pastor when you continue to have people you love, Christians in your flock, who continue to want to see the secular psychologist. And you just want to ask them, oh, so you want to go see this secular psychologist, huh? For what? Oh, to care for your soul. Okay. And the likelihood is that probably the majority, if not most, professional secular psychologists, they believe in evolution that you came from an animal or non-life and that actually you are an animal. So just with those two presuppositions, you came from an animal and you are an animal.
Derek: That will affect your counseling.
Cliff: Is that really who you want to be asking questions about the problems of life? You think this guy has the solution and the answers to your questions? He believes that I am an animal or a machine and that I came from animals. So I think we have to get really practical. Under the surface, beyond that fluffy, appealing, deceptive probability of a veneer that they pass off that comes across as pseudo-knowledge, pseudo-medicine, pseudo-science, and lay it out there, rip it open so we can see the ugly guts of its history and its origin, which is what you’ve been doing the last two episodes. And Christians need to be exposed to that. And some Christians, they’re afraid to hear the history. They’re afraid of the truth. The truth hurts. Facts are stubborn things. All those things they say. But no, we got to know the truth. Know the truth and the truth will set you free applies in every area.
Derek: Yeah, that’s right. And so much here because we are talking about the care of your soul. One of the things that Jay Adams brought out, which I thought was incredibly insightful, is that he asked the question, by what standard will you judge your success in counseling? And you have a standard, and you got to judge whether or not you’re successful. How are you going to judge that success? And the Christian at the end of the day has to say, well, the only standard to judge whether or not someone has been successful in counseling must be the word of God.
Because what we are talking about are the things that are the purview of Scripture. How you think, how you feel, how you act, how you conduct yourself, how you handle your relationships, how you handle the issues of anxiety and lust and self-control and addiction. And these are all the purview of Scripture. And at the end of the day, what is most beneficial for you is to have your soul healed by Jesus according to his standards and to have your soul cared for in a way that accords with divine wisdom. And that is truly eternally beneficial for you. And you will find out that is also temporally beneficial for you as well. One of the things that’s interesting about Jay Adams was that he despised a lot of psychological practice because it would just carry on indefinitely. Basically, you just latched on to a therapist for the rest of your life. Whereas in his model, you could actually overcome your problems. He believed, crazily enough, that you, through good, solid biblical counsel that you engaged in, you did your homework, you did your part, you could actually overcome your problems and taste the fruit of God’s goodness in your life through this biblical counseling.
Cliff: Yeah, amen. You can have victory. How encouraging is that?
Derek: Yeah. Any last words, Cliff, before we close this one out?
Cliff: I got a Bible verse and a reminder that if you know Jesus, Jesus is sufficient. As you read on that last episode from Colossians 2, because of in Him is all the resources and wisdom available that we need. Jesus is sufficient. The Spirit of God that lives in you, Christian, is sufficient. Your salvation is sufficient, encompasses everything. The church is sufficient for all of your relationships and social needs. The Bible is sufficient. Prayer is sufficient. In other words, your Christian worldview is sufficient. And just this great verse, sweet promise of Ephesians 3:20, Paul says, Now to Him, that’s God, who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us. That’s the Spirit that lives in us. One more time. Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us.
Derek: What an excellent verse to end on. Trusting in the Lord, looking to the Lord to do incredible things in our lives, and overcoming what we perceive to be insurmountable obstacles, the Lord can change us as we walk in the Spirit, as we apply the truth. God is good, and he richly blesses his children as they walk in obedience. So that was a wonderful verse to close on. We just thank you for listening. We hope that this has been helpful for you. We encourage you again to check out WithAllWisdom.org. We have articles on Biblical Counseling on the website. We have other podcasts we want you to find and hopefully listen to and find useful. And until next time, keep seeking the Lord in his word.
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