Biblical Counseling vs.

Christian Psychology
This past fall I took an evening course on Biblical Counseling at theCollege of Biblical Studies here in Houston, and it completely ROCKED my perspective on the church's role in counseling.

Since most of us are involved in some form of discipleship or may have sought or have a need to seek counseling at some point in life, I wanted to share a bit of my learnings through this blog. I will probably continue to post on this topic periodically as it has become a key topic of study for me, but I wanted to initially set the foundation.

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Fundamentally, when you think about counseling, there are three major schools of thought.

1) Psychological Counseling - combines human observations with human wisdom to construct a system of counsel to help man deal with his problems and issues of life. Generally practiced by non-believers and Christians who accept psychological theories as an avenue to help people.

2) Integration Counseling - combines human observation, human wisdom, and the Bible to construct a system of counsel to help man deal with his problems and issues of life. Sometimes called "Christian Counseling." Often practiced by Christians who believe the bible should be supplemented with psychological theories in order to help people.

3) Biblical Counseling - Uses the Bible to construct a system of counsel to help man deal with his problems and issues of life. Generally practiced by Christians who believe that the Bible has all we need to provide solutions to life's problems and to help man function as God intended in all aspects.

Now, after the very first class last fall, I was thoroughly convinced that "Biblical Counseling" is the only option that is consistently supported by the whole of scripture. I've listed the key points in support of this below.

Why promote Biblical Counseling above the others?

1) We are warned in scripture not to trust human wisdom for principles of living, understanding of human

attitudes, motives, behaviors, and our solution for man's inner problems. (Psalm 1:1-2, Colossians 2:8)

2) We are warned in scripture not to trust our own wisdom because we can be deceived by our own wisdom. (Proverbs 3:5-6, 14:12, 16:2, 25, 21:2, Jeremiah 17:9)

3) We are instructed in scripture that God's wisdom is superior to man's wisdom. Therefore, man's wisdom should not be added to God's wisdom as solutions to man's inner problems. (1 Cor 1:21, 25, 2:2-5, 3:20, Isaiah 55:8-11)

4) We are instructed in scripture that God's wisdom is sufficient to counsel the inner person. (Psalm 119:24, 99, 100, Hebrews 4:12, Psalm 19:7-11)

When you think about it, of course, this seems fairly straight forward. After all, I would venture to say that most believers would agree with the points above, but our faith in this is tested when the rubber meets the road in our churches and seminaries in the area of counseling.

I'll offer a few facts for your consideration and comment...

Very few seminaries are offering programs in purely biblical counseling, most programs are focused on preparing their students for state-licensure which demands an integrationist curriculum. In fact, Southern Seminary is the first of the SBC seminaries taking this step with a new program this fall, raising quite a bit of debate from proponents in both biblical and integrationist camps.

In a large percentage of our churches, in particular our larger churches, counseling is provided by statelicensed therapists who have been trained in integration counseling methods. Now this is not to say that all licensed therapists are unbiblical in the counseling they are providing, but are we assured that the counsel being given in our own churches is based on a biblically supported framework for helping those they are reaching, or have our well-intentioned counselers defaulted to psychological/behavioral techniques of therapy in their desire to "help" those they are counseling.

If so, what is the danger? My professor from this past fall offered this perspective, "Bad theology leads to bad counseling. We haven't gotten deep enough in our knowledge of scripture to help people with their deep problems. Is our goal for people to "feel" better or to "be" better?

John MacArthur and Wayne Mack offer their thoughts on the same topic in an article titled, "Is there any difference between biblical counseling and Christian psychology or Christian counseling?"

For further study, this is an excellent link for more information onBiblical Counseling Resources.