I am very thankful for the way I’ve been hosted. Host seems like a fairly mild euphemism for what is actually more like bodyguard or Federal Marshall with handcuffs and that sort of thing. Dave has been taking very good care of me and protecting me from the wolves out here. I keep wanting to go dance with wolves and go run away and he drags me off and makes sure that I get rest. Let me intercede with our Lord as we begin here.

All Life in Relation to God

Before we get into the main topic tonight in terms of conversation proclamation, a couple of people pointed out to me that I promised you four points and then got lost in the first one. Now, actually all four got all woven together there, but I think it’s worth just a quick refresher. What I was talking about was just a very simple way of slicing the pie of what goes into our understanding of people in terms of their pastoral situation, their existential situation, and I made this gesture with a circle of my hand in front of me that there’s a situation people live in and it’s significant, and then you also saw this gesture, this kind of vertical horizontal gesture. People are always living in two planes, two dimensions. We are always responding to our situation either in sin or in the fruit of the Spirit. We are always worshiping something, either the idolatries we create or the one living, true speaking, redeeming God. And there is the real world in which people respond and react because there are reasons that anchor in our hearts and who is our God.

Then the whole shooting match you might say is in a globe of the purposes of the living God, that God himself is man’s environment. It is not simply professing Christian people who live in relationship to God. Every human being lives in relationship to God. Every movement of the human psyche is vis-a-vis God. Every expression of anger by a Buddhist, an atheist, or whoever, it is with respect to God because in that sinful anger that any person does is an expression of the worship of their own pride, of their own demands of the universe, of their own fears, as opposed to the worship of the one living and true God, our redeemer who is meant to claim their lives. So every psychological act, every interaction between people is an expression of life in God’s world and it is vis-a-vis God, and we don’t just simply let the diagnosis of the human dilemma be defined autonomously and then bring in God later as though Christ somehow fixes what we define in some other way. The human condition exists with respect to God.

Coram Deo is not just our goal as though we would live Coram Deo, we would live consciously before the face of our God. Coram Deo is the reality of every human being. We live before God and the reason the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom is because the fear of the Lord is the wake-up call to what is, that our lives are lived before eyes, that there are no secrets, that all hearts are laid bare, that every human being — man, woman, child — of whatever profession, of whatever faith they say they are, of whatever God they claim to worship or not worship, are radically dependent on and accountable to the one living in true God who sustains them and whom they were made for and whom alone they need. They need his good favor and they need his mercy now because they’re sinners and they need the power of the Holy Spirit to make them new.

The Active Verbs of the Human Heart

It’s this reality in which we preach, it’s this reality in which we counsel, it’s this reality in which we pray, and it’s this reality in which we worship, and we want those ministries to all be unified. I think it is essential that we grasp that the human heart is active. In every one of the psychologies that’s well known — medical model of human beings, needs model, instincts model, drive model — the human heart is always passive, hardwired. It’s fundamentally worked on by other forces, either sociocultural forces or biological forces. It is in Scripture that we find out the human heart is an active verb. Every human being is an active verb. And the way you get at the issue of the motivation, this vertical dimension issue, is you take the verbs the Bible gives you to relate to God.

We are called to love God with heart, soul, mind, and might. What do we love instead? See, everybody loves something. We are called to take refuge in the one redeemer. Where do you take refuge? People wonder sometimes where the proof texts are for some of the more exotic addictions? There’s a few things in the Bible about drunkenness, but you know where the proof text for the addictions is? The whole book of Psalms, because addictions are about where you take refuge. The addictive behaviors, that’s the horizontal part, that’s the reaction to life’s stresses, that’s the reaction to the invitations and beguilement of the supermarket of goodies. But the reason we do that is because we take refuge in the pleasures that that idol offers to us.

The whole book of Psalms is about refuge. We are called to fear the Lord. Who do you fear? We’re called to obey his voice. Which voice do you listen to? You see, the human heart is an active verb and it’s an active verb vis-a-vis God because it is either the active verb of every human passion — love, fear, delight, hope, joy, obedience, refuge — is either pointed toward God or toward the host of the idols. Our psychology, the Bible psychology, God’s psychology — we can be so bold as to say — is revealed in the Bible. That’s what it is, and we stand alone in this world that needs that particular view of human existence.

Our Conception of Ministry

And here’s the main topic. As we have said this here, it’s about a vision of the ministry of the word that includes both the proclamation, the public ministry, the things we’re doing right now and then the conversation — the face-to-face, the back and forth, the interactive parts. Both are part of it. In fact, we could probably say there’s actually three levels of ministry, really. There’s public ministry and the distinctiveness of public ministry you could say is this: It does not have your name on it. Public ministry does not have your name on it. Your name gets written on the truth that gets preached and taught and worshiped by the Holy Spirit working in you, and you don’t see it unless we have a conversation later. Then I might find out about it and interact. Public ministry does not have your name written on it. I will not say Bill Lawn, or Tommy Oates, or C.J. Mahaney, or John Piper, but the Holy Spirit will take things that are said and apply them into each of us by name. That’s public ministry.

Then at the other end you can say there’s private ministry, which is your closet and your study and it’s your devotions and it’s your personal prayer life and it’s the place where you meet God yourself before the audience of one. Then in between there’s the conversational, and that’s all sorts of other things, from the more formal things that get called counseling or discipleship to those things that have to do with just simple friendship, with hospitality, one anothering, small groups, casual conversations in the foyer. It’s all the things of personal ministry and it’s there that ministry does have your name on it. We are known by others and we know others — if the body of Christ is healthy, if the conversational aspects of ministry are actually taking place in the way that they are meant to.

Now, there’s a problem that comes up here and this is why we’re here to talk about these things is that in our conception of ministry, we get some holes that tend to leave that middle out. In fact, I am persuaded by this. None of us would ever say this, but I would suggest to you that for many people in the conservative church and perhaps many of us, there is a covert ideal. When we hear the word “minister of the word” or “ministry of the word,” we tend to think as though it’s a transaction between the closet and the study, and then unsullied by human hands, I’m in the pulpit. It’s this covert ideal of the nature of the minister of the word is someone who actually he only has to talk to people if he gets hassled or have to go to a staff meeting or something like that or runs into somebody in the hall that’s crying. But it’s a false ideal, isn’t it?

It’s not the way that ministry works, it’s not a movement from study and closet to pulpit. There is a study and a closet and there is a pulpit, but it’s via a host of conversations of interactions and so forth. I’ve even read books to this effect that actually equate. It’ll be a book on the ministry of the word and it will be a book on preaching only. There’s nothing I’m saying against preaching in any way, shape or form, but for a book on ministry of the word, preaching is part of the ministry of the word, but there’s lots of other parts aren’t there? A book on the ministry of the word ought to be ultimately at every level, or if it’s going to talk about preaching, to set it in a larger frame so we don’t get distorted covert ideals.

Contra Counseling

There actually have been at times leaders in the evangelical church who have argued against counseling ministry. There was a well-known book in the 1980s, a church growth book, that was very popular. The man made the comment, “Don’t ever get involved in counseling if you want your church to grow because it’ll eat you up.” Now I know what he means. There’s something good he’s going for there, but it comes from a faulty vision of counseling. It’s a vision that counseling is listening to a bunch of whiners and being a hand holder, and it’s a bunch of people that are never going to change, there’s no change agenda in their lives and you just listen to them vent, and you’re nice and you nod and then you send them off and then you see them next week, and you get about 20 of those people in your life and there’ll be sand in the gears. Your church will not grow. So yeah, that kind of counseling, don’t get involved in that.

But he failed to conceptualize the nature of the church. He failed to read Ephesians 4. He failed to read Hebrews 3:12–14, which says, “Encourage one another daily that none of you be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness, that you hold on to Christ.” He failed to have a vision. He failed to read Luke 6:43–45, to have a vision that actually the biblical definition of counseling is every word that comes out of your mouth and that it is out of the treasure of the human heart that controls not just the times we think we’re counseling, but we are counseling in every single conversation. Even the fact that we choose in the foyer to have an utterly meaningless conversation about football or the weather, there is an agenda playing out there. It is reflecting the worship structure of our hearts.

Now it may something like, “I just want my comfort and convenience and don’t bug me,” or it may something like, “I’m afraid of you and I don’t want you to get too close,” or it may be something like, “I’m superior to you and I really can’t be bothered to try to find out what’s going on in your life.” See, just casual conversation is not so casual from this standpoint of God because we will be judged for every word that comes out of our mouth, and every word is an expression of the worship structure. In the biblical view, you don’t start and think about what counseling is by envisioning an office once a week for an hour with a paid professional. The way you start in getting a biblical vision is that you think about any and every human interaction that is verbal. Counseling is always taking place. The way we talk about the weather reveals our worldview. Every single time it does it.

Another man who was one of the great leaders of evangelicalism of the last generation taught frequently that if you preach the word faithfully, do public ministry, and taught people to have their private devotions, they wouldn’t need counseling. Again, you can put a good spin on that and say he probably had a wrong idea of counseling, and yeah, there’s a certain meaning to that that’s probably right. But he failed to see that actually if you preach the word faithfully and you teach people how to have a good devotional life, you will create a community of mutual counsel. That’s actually what you’ll create is counseling. That’s the goal. That’s what love is. That’s what one-anothering is. That’s what interaction is. That’s what bearing one another’s burdens is. That’s what encouraging one another daily is. So it’s actually the successful preaching of the word and the teaching people how to meet God that creates a community of counsel to one another. It’s a very, very different vision.

A Ministry of Vigorous Interpersonal Interaction

Now, I want to take a few minutes and just think about this biblically. Given the principal passages for it. Hebrews 3:12–14, clear as a bell, there’s a call to something. It’s just that daily life is a Christ-centered, nourishing kind of conversation. That means everything from making an appointment and getting together to just saying, “Hello, it’s snowing outside.” Everything ought to be in some way part of that daily encouragement. The principle is there in Ephesians 4:15–16. It’s there in Ephesians 4:29. Very interesting, isn’t it? Ephesians 4:29 is hooked back to the rest of the chapter because what he’s saying is that every single word out of your mouth ought to give grace to those who hear. That’s really remarkable. Every attitude — no grumbling, no complaining, no backbiting, no sneer of disdain, no body language or tone of voice. Every word gives grace to those who hear, and that’s part of the counseling.

See, Ephesians 4:29 is not just some moral. Someone might say, “Now we’re getting onto morals in 4:15–16 regarding speaking the truth in love. That’s church ministry.” They’re talking about the same thing. Ephesians 4:15–16 certainly includes the public ministry of the word — teachers and apostles and pastors and so forth — but it also includes this one anothering by which every member does its part and the whole body grows up into the head, even Christ.

But I don’t want to look at a principal passage, I want to look at a narrative passage. Obviously, you treat narrative passages carefully. You don’t draw your principles out of a narrative passage, so I freely acknowledge I’m using this in a provocative way, in an illustrational way for a principle that is established elsewhere. But I want you to think with me for a minute about a big chunk of Mark.

I picked this at random actually. I was reading Mark when I was thinking about this and the more I got into it, the more the doors blew open. Mark 7–11 is what I’d looked at. I got looking at it in terms of what’s going on in terms of the nature of ministry, this proclamation and conversational ministry. As I went through Mark 7–11, it breaks out into 26 scenes over those five chapters. Now, interestingly, four of them are pure proclamation. Jesus is before the crowds and he teaches, and there’s no interaction, no give and take, no back and forth, no he-said-she-said. Four of them are action scenes and there’s not really any conversation that has a ministry of the word feel to it, and 18 of those 26 scenes are conversations, back and forth.

They are about this vigorous interpersonal interaction. They are conversations that have your name on it. They’re conversations that have your questions in them of Jesus. Some of them are hostile questions, some of them are inquiring questions, some of them are needy questions or they have Jesus questions of you: “Do you serve me? Are you for me? What are you living for? Why do you think that?” And the intensity level of those conversations is pretty mind-blowing. They are pointed personal interactions. They are very direct and very intentional. It’s not a random conversation. There is not a wasted word. It is intentional conversation back and forth, discussion, interaction. He says, “What do you think?” And you know what? There’s a very consistent topic throughout all the conversations.

The topic is the same one that gets put in principal form in Hebrews 3 about we’re to encourage each other. The question is, where is your heart at? Do you love God? Do you have a heart for God? From the standpoint of Jesus, “Do you trust me? Are you looking to me in your need? Are you serving me? Do you love me? Where is your faith at? Where do you put your faith?” Jesus’s intentionality in every single interaction is always coming back at that question: “What are you living for? What’s controlling you? Do you love me? Where are you at with God?” They are those sorts of things. And as I said, of the 22 pastoral situations, some proclamation, some conversational, 18 of them are intense back and forth conversation. It’s a very interesting fact. Again, it doesn’t say, “Go thou and do likewise.” That’s not the point of the narrative, but very provocative in terms of thinking through this balance in ministry.

The Unity of Conversation and Proclamation

I think one of the things that often happens is that a disjunct is created. I think the disjunct is very obvious for counseling types. Most counseling types just view preaching as irrelevant to what they do in the world we live in. Counseling is just a completely different segment. It’s like auto mechanics and preaching. What do they have to do with each other? Nothing. That’s often true. But I think one of the things that often happens is that preaching types also tend to lose the connection here, and oftentimes “counseling problems” are referred to other people, referred to the designated experts.

In fact, one of my colleagues at CCEF in Westminster, Paul Tripp, tells a story of a student in a class. Paul presented a pastoral case and threw it to the class for consideration, and the student’s response was, “How do you sort of get through these cases so you can get onto the ministry?” Paul said it was the most beautiful teaching moment that was ever handed to him. He said, “What do you mean, how do you get through these cases to get into the ministry? This is the ministry. These are the people God’s put you with to interact with.” But there was a man that just saw it wrong.

Many times our skills in what you could call “the more unscripted conversation” are just not up to snuff. Conversation is like jazz. Even preaching is not totally classical music, is it? It’s more that way. It’s more scripted, it’s more scored, but counseling is not that way at all. A conversation is not that way at all. It’s classical music versus jazz. It’s an improv theater. It’s extemporaneous. You construct your messages on the fly. Nehemiah prayers are firing up all the time. It’s you’re out of your comfort zone and you don’t have the manuscript in front of you, but man, is it a blast. I mean, it’s the center. These are the people. It’s in the conversation that you know the flock.

Actually, in terms of evangelicals, I only know of one man who’s written on the interplay between proclamation and conversation that Dave alluded to and that is our topic here. That’s Jay Adams. Jay Adams has written on that and his commented, I think, very wisely on the way that conversation proclamation feed each other.

Now, you might put it this way: Conversation lends to proclamation a note of authenticity and reality. When you talk with people and then you preach, they know that you know them. I remember this back in seminary when they were trying to teach us how to come up with sermon illustrations and metaphors and all that. It had such an artificial ring. Hang around with a few people, you’ll never lack for illustration and application. It’s not that you say, “You want to see an illustration of this? Think about Susie and Joe. Boy, are they . . .” No, it’s not that, but the conflicts Susie and Joe have are the same ones that you and your wife have, and the same ones that Julie and Sam have, and they are generically similar. When you know people, your preaching comes alive in a certain way. There’s an authenticity, a relevance that people cannot miss.

A Note of Confidence and Authority

In the same way, here’s one of the places where counseling types really are the sufferers here. Proclamation lends to conversation a note of confidence and authority that there is truth, that God is real, that the word of God is true and it’s about human life. Preaching and teaching tend to be the context that force us to get to do our study and our digging in Scripture.

When you’re talking to Joe and Sally, you’re not going to take a half hour time out to go do a Bible study, but if you did the Bible study for your sermon of your Sunday school class or a teaching time three weeks ago, you’ve got it in hand, you did your work, and it brings into the counseling moment that confidence in who God is and in the nature of the gospel. They play off each other. A divine authority is lent to counseling and conversation that gives you confidence about the truth and the ability then to proceed, to help people to respond to God. They go hand in hand.

The Trajectory of the Church

I’m going to leave that topic right now, and I want to go in a somewhat different direction as we take it home here. When John Piper asked me to come and speak, one of the things he asked me to do was to talk about “where to.” Where are we going? We as individuals, we as the church. What is the trajectory towards which we are heading? And they might think that what I’m going to say in the next few minutes is going to be in the style of a blueprint. I’m not going to build a house, we’re not going to look at the furniture, and we’re not going to put the wallboard on and paint it. It’ll be a blueprint, it’s a sketch of the house. It’s the outlines, not the substance of it.

But I think it can be helpful for us to think through the trajectory, and hopefully, if there’s any truth to the trajectory I’m putting out before us, it would then be the trajectory that Jesus would have us go on. It would be the trajectory of Christ. But what is the call of the hour? Where must we go? Where is the cutting edge for our generation, for our lives and ministries? I want to look at this from a number of different directions.

The Danger of Syncretism

First of all, I want to talk about two ditches that we do not want the drunken peasant to fall into. Two ditches we don’t want to fall into. One is syncretism. In response to the ocean liner being claimed by the psychologies and the church getting squeezed out to the lifeboats, a lot of people over the last 40, 50 years have said the best way to remedy the situation is to combine in some way this lifeboat truth with the ocean liner truth. Now, the classic statement of that agenda is what gets called integration. That’s the buzzword. It’s the integration of psychology and Christianity, the integration of secular psychologies with the truths of the faith and so forth.

Sometimes it is an intentional integration. That’s largely true from, say, 1965 when Fuller’s Graduate School of Psychology was founded up until really around the early 1990s when the integration program started to die and gutter out in terms of intellectual horsepower. So for about 25 years, there have been people who very intentionally sought to combine the two. But it’s been interesting, even within the Christian evangelical psychotherapy community, that there’s been an increasing disillusionment with that as an intentional agenda.

The other thing that happens is it’s done unintentionally. Well-meaning Christian people who love the Lord get persuaded at some piece of a secular theory makes a whole lot of sense and they somehow cobble the thing together. Psychologies are the cultural area we breathe. They are around us everywhere. They’re the way the whole culture thinks. It’s very hard not to think that way.

I’ll give you a very simple example of unintentional integration or syncretism. The man that founded the psych department at Wheaton College,the graduate psych department, Stan Jones, wrote a book with a colleague called Modern Psychotherapies. He wanted to present a biblical Christian outlook on modern psychotherapies. It was interesting though because his starting point was this, he defined counseling. He defined counseling as “an intentional relationship between a designated professional who meets with an identified client or patient who is in need.” It sounds so plausible. That’s what the culture calls counseling. I would say though that that opening definition was a fundamental misstep that put the whole book off. He was never able to rise up to the vision that the Bible sets forth because if you start with that definition of counseling, you know how much the Bible says about counseling? Zero. The Bible is not about counseling. Your definition of the topic has excluded Scripture from relevancy.

But if you start with the definition of counseling, like the one that I gave a few minutes ago — it’s out of the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks and you’ll be judged for every word out of your mouth, and human beings are council givers and council receivers in every interaction — all of a sudden all of human life is counseling and it’s all evaluated by the living God. All of a sudden, how much of the Bible is about counseling? All of it. His fundamental misstep made it look like to him the Bible didn’t have a whole lot to say about the topic he was going to consider. I’d call that an unintentional look, an unintentional misstep.

The Pastor’s Place in Counseling

It’s been interesting how leaders among evangelical psychotherapists have spoken. Over the last 10 years, there have been some ferment afoot and I have no idea where it’ll turn out, but it is certainly interesting. David Benner, editor of the Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology, used to teach at Wheaton and he is one of the leaders in the field. I heard him speak a couple years ago. Here’s his comment, “We have mispositioned Christian psychology over the last 30 years by not understanding it as ministry, by not understanding it as the cure of souls, by not relating it to Jesus Christ, but by taking our cues from secular professionalism both as an institutional structure and as an intellectual model.” That’s interesting. Now, I don’t know where he is going to come out, but he is certainly seeing things in a very different way than they had been seen historically for the previous 30 years.

Here’s another comment from Benner, “Integration is a bad metaphor,” and that’s interesting. I mean, he wrote the Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology. It is the magnum opus of the integration community. He continues: “Integration is a bad metaphor because it promises to bring together two different things, when the Christian view of the human soul shows that the psychological and the spiritual are the same thing.” That’s a great comment. That’s true because they are the same.

This thought, “Okay, pastor. You do your job over here, but we let the professional counselors do their thing over here,” has been sustained by a division of analysis where on the one hand you had spiritual and moral problems, like how you get saved and what the Bible teaches you about assurance and how you have your quiet time. That’s a spiritual problem. So you, Joe Pastor, that’s your bailiwick, but then there are these other kinds of problems called “psychological problems” or “emotional problems” or “mental problems” or “adjustment problems” or “personality conflicts,” or those sorts of things, and those belong to someone else. What Benner is seeing is something that’s just patently obvious from the pages of the Bible: there’s no difference. They are just different names for the same thing, like horse and cheval. They are two different languages, but they’re talking about the same thing. They aren’t two different things.

The Burnout of Syncretism

Gary Collins. Interesting. I mean, Collins is probably the grand old man of the integrationist’s cause and he is certainly not given up trying to push very aggressively for a Christian evangelical psychotherapy community, but Collins has fundamentally given up on integration as an intellectual agenda, and that book that Dave waived earlier that I also contributed to, Psychology & Christianity: Four Views, Collins argues what is called the integration position there. But it’s interesting that basically, from the standpoint of epistemology, he’s abandoned the integration position. He says:

Integration is in a state of intellectual confusion. The term signifies a mystery, a slogan. It is a buzzword that elicits warm feelings. It is a recruiting gimmick more than a genuine scholarly achievement or practical methodology.

That is an amazing statement. I mean, the existence of whole departments in Christian graduate schools and seminaries hangs on the fact that integration would be an activity and an intellectual practical agenda that is definable, theologically defensible, intellectually productive, and practically helpful. But Collins is saying it’s not, and in essence what his article goes on and does is just say that psychologists need to become Christians. Just be Christians and be faithful to God and do theology and love people. It’s a very interesting article. We don’t want to fall into syncretism. Syncretism is the easy way and in the providence of a loving God, syncretism is burning out currently, which is awfully nice from our standpoint.

It’s been interesting that the leading organization of Christian psychologists, the AACC, Gary Collins’s organization, it’s most recent initiative is to develop what they call “biblical counseling.” Now, it may be the same old horse just painted, I don’t know. But it’s at least interesting that in a way that’s the only horse to bet on because the psychologies are seen as a lost cause in some fundamental way.

The Danger of Biblicism

That’s one danger. That’s one ditch we don’t want to drop off into, but there is another ditch that’s the danger of the more Bible-oriented types. We don’t want to be syncretistic, but we also don’t want to fall in the ditch of being Biblicist. You add istic to a word and you make it bad, right? It’s great to have piety. Don’t be pietistic, right? It’s great to have morals, don’t be moralistic. And we don’t want to be Biblicistic either, and the characteristics of Biblicism, which run deeply within conservative Protestants, are things like this: There is a proof text for every problem. That’s not true. That’s not the way the Bible teaches us to do theology. That’s not the way that preaching works. That’s not the way effective counseling will work.

The Bible tends to be viewed as a correlate of the proof text to every problem. The Bible is also viewed as a vast encyclopedia of all problems. Your key access tool is the concordance. Now, a concordance is a useful tool, but the Bible is not some scrambled encyclopedia where the concordance is the best way to unscramble it. The Bible is a very different kind of book and it has different kinds of purposes, and that notion of the Bible as an encyclopedia that is exhaustive on every topic is a false view of the nature of ministry and a false view of the authority and sufficiency of the Bible.

Pursuing Quick Change

Where it also tends to go with Biblicism is that change would be quick, or another part of it, there’s nothing to learn from the outside. In a sense, close yourself into the horizon for the first century and before, and Christian thinking has never taken that view. There are always things to learn. The Bible keys your gaze, such you go look at the whole world. That’s been the Christian response because God is the creator and the redeemer of the real world. There’s plenty we learn from the outside.

Also, there is a tendency to reduce biblical truth to a system of timeless moral principles, a system of doctrines and explanations and abstract truths. Again, that doesn’t fit the nature of what the Bible is. The Bible is this living story of this redeeming God in the person of Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of glory, invading people’s lives. It’s not a system of timeless moral principles and so forth that are there.

Or you have the notion that biblical counseling, if there were such a thing, would simply consist of the citation and quotation of Bible verses. How could that possibly be? Biblical preaching is not that. I’ve heard wonderful sermons that quoted one Bible verse. It’s a strategic decision how many Bible verses you quote. You may quote in a counseling session 20 Bible verses, you may quote one, maybe you quote none in certain situations. Would it be sinful not to ever quote a Bible verse? Of course not. Truth can happen without citation and quotation, right? That Biblicism ditch keeps us from actually discovering the nature of the call we have to a trajectory of pastoral and practical theological development. Those are two ditches we don’t want to run into.

Five Points on the Sufficiency of the Bible

But then here is this next comment. I have five points about the sufficiency of the Bible. What does the sufficiency of the Bible mean? We’re not going to be Biblicists and we’re not going to be syncretists. Syncretism gets us lost in the modern western psychologies, and Biblicism ducks the hermeneutical questions that call to a practical theological task. Well then what is the sufficiency of the Bible? How do we understand some of what it would be saying to us? I have five quick points, and obviously I am now doing blueprints, not building the whole house.

1. Comprehensive, Not Exhaustive

Comment number one, the Bible is comprehensive, it is not exhaustive. That’s a very important difference. It’s comprehensive. Eyeglasses are comprehensive. They let you look at everything. Eyeglasses do not contain everything. The Bible is the redemptive word that re-keys our vision and it also contains a vast host of particular truths and so forth, but it does not contain all reality, does it? It is a gaze on all reality. It is comprehensive, it is not exhaustive. Biblicism would say it’s exhaustive. Fidelity to Scripture would say it is comprehensive, it is constitutive, it is penetrating of the human heart, it is the interpretation of everything you’ll see.

You can think from within the standpoint of the Bible about everything from astronomy, to manic depression, to medical problems, to couples in conflict. You can think about it all from through the eyeglasses of Scripture. I’m just here repeating the wonderful insight of John Calvin, the Augustinian Calvin presuppositional understanding of the nature of Scripture, this treasure that God has given us. In fact, you could actually say that we would do a disservice to Scripture if we understand it as an encyclopedia that’s meant to contain everything, not as this mind of Christ that jets us out to look at everything, study everything, engage everything, and interact with everything.

2. Understandings Built from Scripture

The banner phrase on the sufficiency of Scripture is Sola Scriptura. You build your understanding from the Scripture. The Bible alone is the place where you understand the meaning of life. My little simple picture is my world I live in, my reaction to it, what motivates me, and the globe that surrounds it, the living God. That is from the Bible and it is only the Bible that has taught me that because sin-kinked eyes can’t come up with that. One-hundred years of modern psychology has not yet figured out that that is what reality is, because sin blinds us. Sola Scriptura. It is only the scripture that opens the eyes of the human heart.

But that is never meant that there’s nothing to learn from outside the pages of scripture, extra biblical information. In fact, the whole nature of counseling ministry and preaching ministry to boot is an engagement with extra biblical information. You cannot preach a sermon without extra-biblical information. You must know your people. You must know what they deal with. You must know your culture. You must know your times. A pastor is a continual student of the extra biblical, understood in the light of the biblical revelation. But it’s not a despising then of the extra-biblical, although I will never, never dare let what is extra biblical set my gaze. I better not counter-convert. I better not let what they think teach me how to think. I better not adopt the worldview of the newspaper, which is a perverse mammon-worshiping, greed-pandering, lust-pandering, gossip-pandering worldview, but I can learn tons of things from the newspaper that I can use as a sermon illustration without any problem. I’m not getting my worldview out of the newspaper. My worldview, Sola Scriptura, lets me engage what’s out there, and not just newspapers, but anything out there.

3. The Exegetical Basis of Ministry

Third comment, there is an exegetical basis to all ministry. We always go back to the Bible, to the Scriptures. It is grounded in text, right? Theology is grounded in text. Now, by the way, not only is the Bible not a textbook save for counseling, it’s not a textbook of theology either, right? Theology is a labor, it is a construct, it is a wrestling that is faithful to the text. It’s laboring to establish our understanding of the Bible on solid grounds. The goal is not to find a proof text for everything, but you are always grounded in text. It’s that tension. For example, there’s not a proof text on eating disorders. There are some provocative verses because the people starve themselves to death and there’s a multitude of reasons that can happen. There’s a number of suicides in the Bible, but they don’t exhaust everything that goes on in suicide. They provide certain forms of thought. They’re provocative.

There may be a direct peril in certain cases. There may be someone who’s “anorexic” and it does map onto some of the Psalms in a direct way because in a sense of great tragedy, they’ve given up on life, and they’re wasting away. But there may be other aspects of it where there’s no proof text on that particular behavior, but there is a thematic understanding that is biblical that roots in texts, and then you go back into the world and you understand that “eating disorder” in the light of what patterns of idolatrous belief drive that behavior in the context of their cultural and experiential setting. And you do thinking. That’s practical theology. You think, you work, and you dig. There’s labor to be done. It’s always back to the Bible, but it’s not finding a proof text or anything.

And counseling is not a matter of just quoting a Bible verse, right? A classic example of this in the Scriptures is in the book of Acts. You see the way in which Paul adapts to the audience, and it is remarkable because the message never changes, but the sermons and speeches are so different from one another, and that difference is keyed to who the audience is. You look in Acts 13 and it is a collage of Bible verses. Why? He’s talking in a synagogue. These are people who believe the Bible, and so from the Bible, he’s establishing the nature of who Jesus Christ is.

A chapter later in Acts 14, he’s in Lystra. Now, what is he talking about? Weather, sunshine, rain, crops, and he ends up on the same punchline. It’s the same bottom line. It’s the same God, creator, and redeemer, but he gets there a different way because he makes point of contact. In fact, he doesn’t quote any Bible verses there, but he alludes to a bunch of them and it’s the same truth world, but he speaks a different language. And then you bump into Acts 17 where he is talking to intellectuals and he quotes their poets, their philosophers, and makes an observation of what’s going on in their city, and out of their literature, he brings them to the exact same message of who God is. That’s a strategic decision. It’s not just a matter of quoting a Bible verse.

It is a strategic decision and there may be people in ministry where the whole thing is dosed in Bible, people who love the word of God, they are submissive to the word of God and they want the word of God, and there will be other people where in your personal ministry is one of your goals to get to the place where they open the word of God without flinching, but you will win them other ways. It’s by the same truth and the same God, but you’ll get there through a different path. The Scriptures are sufficient for the tasks of practical theology, the tasks of preaching, and the tasks of ministry. The Bible though is not a textbook and a source of proof texts any more than it is for theology, right? It’s that point.

4. No Disrespect for Tradition

Next, there’s no disrespect of tradition. There’s a coherence in what we will do in practical theology with the creeds, with the wise hymns. It’s no accident that we’ve been quoting John Newton and I’ve been promising that what we have to have is a counseling model that is absolutely coherent with the hymns we sang in the first 20 minutes. We are coherent with the wise books, with Augustine, with Calvin, with Luther, with Jonathan Edwards, and at the same time, we need fresh criteria of judgment. There is fresh work to be done. Not every past theologian or pastor is worth resurrecting from the standpoint of his ideas about counseling. There’s a lot of crud in church history. So how are you going to sort out the wheat from the chaff? You need now a fresh criteria. You need a systematic theology of pastoral counseling. There’s fresh work to be done. There’s a task.

5. Systematically Biblical Counseling

My final point is that there is such a thing as systematic biblical counseling. That is a work that must engage us all. It is a calling that we are called to actually develop something that has not existed in the form it will exist in the year 2001 of the year 2010. There’s a call there. There’s always labor. There’s a continuity with the past, there’s a continual reference exegetically (Sola Scriptura). Forget about the business or the call of the hour. There’s a blueprint for the future. There’s a trajectory of theological and pastoral work that we have got to do.

Five Points Regarding Systematically Biblical Counseling

What will that look like? I have five components of systematically biblical counseling. By the way, these are the components of any counseling model. I’m just tweaking it into a biblical model.

1. A Penetrating Analysis of the Human Condition

First, there should be an analysis of what’s wrong, an analysis of the human condition. There should be a description of what motivates people and how you weigh experience. How do you weigh physiology? How do you weigh social and cultural experience and trauma and so forth? You need an analysis of the human condition that is penetrating (it goes as deep as you have to go) and it’s broad (it’s comprehensive to handle the diversity and complexity of human existence). We have that, right? I mean, in a nutshell, it’s what the Heidelberg Catechism called “sin and misery.” That’s the three word version of our diagnosis. Now, we can give the 30 word version and we can give the 30,000 word version, and we could give the 300,000 word version with a series of 10 films to illustrate different aspects of it. We’ve got the analysis and we need to work on it. We need to write the 30,000 words, we need to write the 300,000 words, we need to do the films, and we need to write the case studies.

2. An Effective Solution

Second, you need an effective solution to what’s wrong, what fixes it, and the solution has to match what’s wrong. The solution has to be as deep as the problem. We alone have that, don’t we brothers? We have that. The solution is the gospel. Christ is the solution. This is one of the things that is the most radical about a Christian vision of counseling. At the end of the day, we don’t simply have our system lined up against other systems, as if there’s 20 or 30 or 200 different counseling systems and models out there. We aren’t just a system in comparison with other systems, and ours might be the best, or we think ours is the truest. What we actually have is a person lined up against systems. Now, in knowing that person, we can think systematically and we can say many things and we can articulate systematic truth, but there’s something so radical. We don’t have a system of redemption; we have a Redeemer that we offer.

Now, perhaps some of you have heard Joni Eareckson Tada tell this story. I think it’s one of the most powerful I’ve ever heard. She was paralyzed at 20 years old. She thought, “Why me?” She had suicidal despair, only she was too powerless to kill herself. Christian people loved her, and she talks about how they tried to give her theological explanations of why this happened, of what God was doing. They tried to give her principles and strategies and ways to deal with their limitations. They tried to give her programs and things to get involved with — explanations, principles, strategies, programs, and activities. And it didn’t help. She describes a story of how a dear friend of hers came in one night, when she was in utter black despair, and she sang to her:

Man of Sorrows, what a name For the Son of God who came, Ruined sinners to reclaim . . .

She realized that a person came for her. A person had suffered. A person would walk with her. A person would be her shepherd. And you’ve read her books. There’s things she does with Steve Estes. She and Steve are averse to putting in principles and theological explanations. When God Weeps has a lengthy appendix on the purposes of God. She’s not averse to starting programs, nor averse to principles of how to deal with things, but those principles, explanations, and programs are embedded in this dramatic redeemer that we offer. An analysis, a solution.

3. A Wise Pastoral Methodology

Third, you need a wise pastoral methodology. Every counseling system has that. You take your concepts and you got to do something, you got to talk to people, and I basically ran that through our first night when I talked about the Sarah case. I put it in five short little words. You walk with integrity, you walk the same path. You too are a sheep. Shepherds are sheep-shepherds who are ministering to sheep-sheep, right? We aren’t shepherd-shepherds. That’s the Lord alone. So you walk the path and you get to know people, and you love them, and you speak into their lives and act into their lives, and you help them enact practical changes. It’s very simple, but there’s a methodology that is as profound as you could ever ask. It’s simple. It’s not simplistic, it’s simple. Incapable of wading into any complexity.

4. Institutional Development

Fourth, you need is institutional development. Counseling happens somewhere. These are the things that churches have to wrestle with. How will we fulfill the call? We want to work on many levels. We want to work on the level of formal pastoral counseling. We want to work on our church discipline. We want to work on other things. Maybe we’re particularly situated with the gifts we have and the needs of our community that starting a lay counseling ministry would be useful. We’re going to need to train people, we’re going to need to have oversight, and we’re going to need to have materials. Maybe we need to have a pastor of counseling. There’s lots of different ways to do it. There’s an institutional development that takes place.

Now the world has got us waxed on this one. The mental health system has got a 100-year head start, but the Lord is the Lord. We’ve got a task to do and he’ll equip us to do it.

Ephesians 4, which talks about the analysis of the human condition and the solution in Christ and lays out that pastoral methodology, but it also has got an institutional structure to die for. It’s this wonderful combination of authority and leadership with one anothering that is called the church. There is no better. The secular world would kill for community. We have the only true community that can create what counseling really needs. For many years, I taught a class called “Counseling in Everyday Life,” and I’d always start the class by asking people, “Who are the most significant people in your lives?” It was a class of 30 or 40 and I’d have people list three or four. What was so interesting is that almost never was it someone you’d call a “professional counselor,” even a professional biblical counselor. The people who were the most significant were parents, pastors, Sunday school teachers, friends, small group leaders, youth workers, college workers, and people who reached out to you and cared for you. They were the people who discipled you, who led you to Christ. The people are most significant for changing your life.

Community is the context for the most effective, significant life-changing counseling takes place. I have often been struck as someone who would get labeled a professional pastoral counselor, that when in talking with people who are part of good communities, you finally get to the bottom line and the person will make a comment like, “What you’re saying to me is just what Susie Smith says to me, my friend, Susie, who prays with me each week,” and rather than taking that as some blow to my pride, I take that as a great compliment. That is how it ought to be because genuine, wise counsel happens within the context of the body.

5. A Place for Critiquing Other Models

Fifth, in systematically biblical counseling, there is a standpoint from which to debunk and critique other models. This isn’t just a quirk of a Christian model. You look at the history of the modern psychologies and they conduct running and continual and perpetual border wars with each other, and the Freudians critique the Skinnerians, and the Skinnerians critique the humanists, and the humanists critique the object relations, and the object relations critique the cognitive behavioral. In order to assert a system, you also have to defend it against all the other systems out there. And again, we have the apologetic model to die for, right? Because we have the truth. We have the mind of the God who’s the critiquer of all the lies and all the idolatries.

Five Steps for a Forward Trajectory in Biblical Counseling

This is a personal trajectory blueprint for where are you going, where do you take what we’ve been talking about. Here are five steps.

1. A Vision

First, you need a vision. I suspect there are people in the room here for things we’ve talked about are something they’re hearing for the first time. It’s as though something you didn’t realize was over the horizon and as it looks above the horizon and you realize, “There is something there that I didn’t know was possible.” You get a vision that something even exists.

2. A Persuasion

Second, you are persuaded it is true and you commit yourself to it. You say, “I don’t know a whole lot about it, but from what I’ve heard, that is what I believe. In fact, I never thought about all this stuff before, but that is exactly how it ought to be. If what I preach every Sunday and what we sing every Sunday and what my Bible tells me is true, it ought to be so that there is this thing that would be radically and systematically Christ-centered, grace-driven, loving, and conversational counseling ministry. I’m committed to it. I still don’t know how to do it, but I know what exists, and I think it’s right.”

3. An Education

Third, you get educated. You have training, follow-through, books, colleagues, supervision, interaction, resources, and videos, and you rub shoulders with like-minded people. There are things to learn. I could give a case study the other night on last night of this woman, Sarah. There are a thousand nuances in that. Why am I able to give those? Because I’ve been counseling for 20-plus years, and you just get case-wise. There are things you know. There are times people look at me and they think I’m a prophet in the mystical sense. I’m no prophet, I just know how people work. I’ve rubbed shoulders with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people and you get to know people. There’s an educational training and learning process that we go through. Take courses, get a degree, or go to Westminster. There are lots of different kinds of things that one can do.

4. A Skill

Fourth, you become skillful, right? In that part, we’re going to be different based on gifting and lots of stuff, and for that part also, there are no shortcuts. That’s five to 10 years. That just takes time. It’s like anything. If you’re learned to become a halfway decent preacher, you didn’t just hatch full-blown, you learned and it took time. You had to do it. You jumped in the water and you floundered and you’d muffed your words and you’d preach boring sermons and you were too abstract, and you have learned to rivet the truth of Christ to the lives of people. It’s been a process. It’s the same in conversational ministry. There’s a skill as the truth gets embodied into wisdom.

5. A Pathway to Leadership

Fifth — and maybe we could say this is 10 to 15 years out — people actually become leaders. We need leaders. One of the great tragedies, as I see it, when Jay Adams first laid out a vision that there was even such a thing as biblical counseling 30 years ago, do you know who was gathered together to assess it? It was a group of a half dozen psychologists from Christian schools. Why? Because there was not a single pastor who had a reputation in the wider Christian world for skill in personal ministry, not a single one. That was pitiful. Now, praise God, 30 years later, the Lord has been raising up some leadership, but there’s a need for leadership. There’s need for intellectual leadership, there’s need for the development of institutions, need people with administrative gifts, with visionary gifts, or how do you reach different people groups with different counseling needs for leadership.

It involves writing, teaching, developing the model, taking what is crude and rough and going the next step. There’s a need for people with every kind of expertise to draw the links between personal ministry and other aspects of truth and ministry. It involves preachers who get a vision for counseling, systematic theologians who get a vision for counseling, lawyers who get a vision for how biblical counseling works coming from their perspective, medical doctors who get a vision for biblical counseling, and people with a background in the mental health professions who get a vision for biblical counseling, like psychologists. Am I against psychologists? No. Why would I be against psychologists?

You could turn the question right around. Am I against pastors? Well, some I am, if they don’t preach the truth and they don’t lead people in the right direction. Am I against psychologists? Some of them, if they don’t preach the truth and lead people in the right direction. That’s probably more in them than in the pastor’s side, but there’s a whole slew of pastors that I don’t think are worth the shoe leather that they wear. Are you in favor or against theology? Well, you’re against bad theology and you’re in favor of good theology. We’re in favor of good psychology and we’re against bad psychology. There is a crying need in a culture that highly reveres the mental health professions for people with those backgrounds and degrees to come out and say, “Do you know what? If you want to know the true psychology this is it. It’s biblical. Biblical wisdom.” There’s a great need for that.

Five Needs of the Church

There was the process of you becoming wise. Here are five needs of the church if we are to reclaim personal ministry.

1. Wisdom in the Church

First, the church needs to become wise in the face-to-face care of souls. Let’s face it. We cannot wave a flag and define an agenda and teach and regulate something that we don’t know how to do. So the sine qua non is wisdom, that we become skillful corporately in all sorts of diverse ways and actually doing ministry that affects lives. That’s number one: wise in the face-to-face care of souls.

2. Creedal Standards

Second, we need creedal standards in the care of souls. If not creedal standards, then we at least need a recognized body of practical theological writing that we can make reference to because an area of truth and practice is not defined as open game for anyone. There’s a man in the PCA, Presbyterian Church in America, a man pursuing ordination in our church. He will be tested on his personal character. He’ll be tested on his Bible knowledge. He’ll be tested on theology proper, his understanding of God. He’ll be tested on soteriology, his view of salvation. He’ll be tested on church government, how does the machinery work? He’ll be tested on church history, how do we get here and where do we come from? He will be tested on preaching, his ability to communicate truth to a crowd in a way that’s not moralistic, but is Christ-honoring.

He will not be tested on his view of personal ministry. He can believe anything he wants. He can cast out demons, he can send them to a psychiatrist, he can believe any of 20 or 30 different “Christian approaches.” He can not believe in counseling at all. He can give him a very rote, routine, rigid moralistic kind of workbook type thing. He can do anything he wants in pastoral counseling, and for his ordination, he will not be asked to present a case study of a marriage disintegrating and what you do. He will not be asked to present a case study of a 21 year old woman enslaved with her bad eating habits, and he ought to be because the personal ministry is the place where the human touch happens. We need creedal standards so that we know what we’re aiming for, so you can hold the church accountable to something. Otherwise, it’s a matter of conscience and you can believe anything you want.

3. Committed Educational Institutions

Third, we need educational institutions committed to biblical vision. 30 years ago, hardly any Christian higher education institutions taught anything about counseling. Now, lots of them do, but unfortunately most of what is taught is in the syncretist, integrationist vein. We need lots of educational institutions, bible colleges and church-based training and seminaries and graduate schools and so forth. We need education that is committed to the Bible’s distinctive way of understanding people and counseling people.

4. Qualifications for Counsels

Fourth, we need the care of souls to become part of the qualifying procedures that recognize fit candidates, that recognize gifts. I’ve mentioned license ordination a minute ago. That’s the level of qualifying pastoral leadership, ordination per se. But at local church levels, you need qualifying as well — the qualifying of gifted lay people and the qualifying of various types of ministry. Who will you send your people to? Who will you refer people to, or who will you have in-house that helps? You have to qualify. You have to have some kind of criteria for that.

5. Church-Grounded Supervisory Structures

Fifth, we need church grounded supervisory structures for the cure of souls. One of the most deadly things about the mental health profession model, it is a completely renegade parapastorate. You have people doing the cure of souls entrusted with lives who have no accountability to the church for their life, their doctrine, their practice, their model, or anything. We need church-based supervisory structures to offer the continuing education and discipline, and hold people accountable to what they believe, and train people in continuing education and the rest. Brothers and the few sisters here, there’s a trajectory. It’s a trajectory to the future. It’s a trajectory that I am persuaded we are on. I think this is a 28-point sermon tonight. I trust that there are at least a couple of those 28 points that are part of where God is going to be immediately talking to you and to your church that we as a body, as a corporate group, would get moving in a more steady, strong, broad, deep way in these sorts of directions, okay?

Oh, and here is one final note. This is a John Piper appreciation note. I’ve mentioned how one of the things that is just so radically different about a Christian vision for counseling is that it’s a person, it’s a Redeemer, not just a system of redemption. But here’s another striking distinctive feature of our counseling model. It is the only one that ends up with joy. As I said, I didn’t come to Christ until I was 25 years old. I majored in psychology, worked in mental hospitals, was psychotherapized by three different schools of thought. There is none of them that ends in joy and our model ends in joy. Psalm 150 is at the end of the Psalter. The final word at the end of personal ministry is the same final word at the end of public ministry; it is the worship that we are made for and it is that we alone offer people a life that has joy at its terminus.

Questions and Answers

We have a few minutes for some Q&A. Jump up to the mics and fire away.

Would you tell us where you would put John MacArthur’s criticism of psychology? Would he fit into the Biblicist model that you spoke of?

John MacArthur is an interesting case in that John MacArthur is one of those people that tends to elevate the pulpit and does not personally have much pastoral touch at the conversational level. But John MacArthur has been committed enough and wise enough to surround himself with people that do have that vision, people like Stuart Scott, Wayne Mack, John Street, and others out there at the Master’s College would have many, many similarities and points of convergence. We would have linked arms as brothers with everything that I’ve been saying. He’d be one of those people, I think, who has seen his strengths and then compensated for some of the places where he is not as gifted and skilled.

Dr. Powlison, you gave us a brief evaluation of Larry Crabb’s writings this morning. I wonder if you could do the same for Jay Adams.

That’s a great question. Now there is a 469-page version of this, because I did my dissertation at University of Pennsylvania on Jay Adams in the history of psychiatry department. So there’s a long version. I’m serious, it is not a bad read. Most dissertations are really boring, but I would submit to you that as dissertations go, it is pretty well-written and it’s interesting. So there’s the long version. There’s also in that black Counsel the Word book, there’s the fourth article in there called “Crucial Issues in Contemporary Biblical Counseling.” It is a friendly criticism of Adams, and I would commend that for the lengthy version on that question.

In a nutshell, Jay Adams, I think, is going to be recognized as one of the great men of the 20th century in terms of church history. He was a pioneer, and it is almost impossible to conceive how hard it is to be a pioneer. We are so socialized into the habits of whatever we’re socialized into. On the other hand, like most pioneers, that sort of prophetic mentality has its strong points and its weak points, and they can both be equally glaring. I would say that these are the strong points: God is man’s environment. The word of God speaks to all of life and to counseling. You’ve got to get specific with people’s lives. It is a privilege to work in people’s lives. Get the details that don’t just talk about change in theoretical generalities. Help people map out how Christ and the Holy Spirit would have them live in their particular world.

The Holy Spirit is alive and well, and for those who are in Christ and have the Holy Spirit, there is a power from without that won’t quit and that will hang with them. The Holy Spirit will bear his fruit. We live in a world of significant consequences: the way of the wicked will perish, the companion of fools will suffer harm, and the way the righteous will prosper. We live in a world in which sufferings are absolutely under the control of the sovereignty of God. Those are all huge strengths. And counseling ought to be church-based and ought to be under the authority of pastoral ministry.

At the same point, as I understand Adams’s model, I see some real areas of weakness. One is that I do not think he emphasizes the vertical dimension in a relational way, in the way that it needs to be. The living relationship of faith in Christ is there, but it’s de-emphasized in favor of behavior. You can get the sense that in a way love of God can be reduced to love of neighbor, rather than giving it its own independent existence. A second criticism I would have is that he does not take the time to take apart the human heart, to look at the structure of people’s idolatries, their desires, their false beliefs, and that too tends to lend his model to a behavioral sort of feel.

Another weakness I would say is that though anecdotally and personally, he’s very compassionate on peoples’ sufferings, you get the sense that he’s so concerned about the danger of blame shifting onto circumstances that he does not take the time that the Bible itself does to acknowledge suffering, to enter into people’s sufferings and difficulties, and to encourage people that one of the fruits of righteousness may be a Psalm 31 outcry of despair and hurt and distress. I just don’t see that in his writing. Although, the book he wrote that had the smallest press run of any was a book called Prayers for Troubled Times. It was a very personal book. It was his prayers. And in those prayers you see a man who honestly anguishes, who lives the Psalms, and it’s somehow in these more didactic writings that note doesn’t come forth.

I think there’s a real weakness in Adam’s doctrine of change. As much as he would like to deny it, I think he has adopted Mowrer’s behavioral model, a habituation model where there are bad behavioral habits, and through a habituation process, you are changed. I think he has adopted a whole lot more of behaviorism in that area than he acknowledges. I think it just doesn’t stack up biblically. I think the Bible’s model of change is not a habituation model, although certainly habit is a part of everything we do, but it is a discipleship model of walking in the presence with a shepherd. There’s a personal, relational ingredient to the Bible’s model of change that I don’t think Adams captures as well as needs to. There’s lots of other things we could say, but those are a few things and I point you to a couple of resources.

Assuming that you have read the book, would you recommend A History of the Cure of Souls by McNeill?

As a pastor, I don’t think you’re not going to get a whole lot out of that book for your pastoral ministry. It’s a history book and it has generalities. The sort of detail and vividness, case study, love, personal repentance, and vitality for Christ and your own walk, and the sorts of things I’ve tried to communicate at least in outline form here, you’re not going to find that in McNeill. But if you have historical interests, it’s the sort of standard survey of pastoral care. Another very interesting book from a historical standpoint is by Brook Holifield. It’s called History of Pastoral Care in America. The subtitle is worth the price of admission: From Salvation to Self-Realization. He traces the history of pastoral care essentially from the time of the colonial days up through the Civil War. Remember, I made that comment the other night that pastoral counseling was about salvation. From the Civil War and honor the 20th Century, as the liberal movement took over, pastoral counseling was about personal fulfillment and those sorts of things.

You mentioned something that scared me a little bit that the Bible is not any more comprehensive for biblical counseling than it is for theology. Can you explain that?

No, I would say in both cases the Bible is comprehensive for theology, as it is for preaching, as it is for counseling, but it’s not a theological textbook per se. Theology is a human effort to make sense of the Bible, just as pastoral counseling and preaching is a human effort to communicate the word of God. The only things where the Bible, you might say, comes straight at us, would be books on tape or Scripture songs that we would sing. In every other case, we are working with Scripture. We are doing pastoral theological labor.

How would you answer the suggestion then from some biblical counselors about 2 Peter 1:3 — he’s given us all things pertaining to life and godliness. They would renounce the Crabb’s rule book approach then to the Scripture. It provides a rule against extra-biblical truth, but then because you use the Scripture as the standard against which to measure extra-biblical things, you then negate the extra biblical information, particularly regarding biblical counseling or the care of souls.

You’re asking a huge question with some subtleties in it. The simplest answer I would give would be that I don’t think 2 Peter 1:3–4 can be taken to mean that we don’t engage with extra-biblical information. It can’t be. In fact, no one does it. Every counselor works with extra-biblical information all the time. That’s what counseling is, starting from, “What is your name? Who are your parents? What’s your job? How do you feel?” So see, extra-biblical information is the grist and the stuff with which all ministry works. The concern of those authors you’re speaking of is to defend — and I would hardly agree with them in this — where do you get your model? Where do you get your eyeglasses? Where do you get your understanding? You only get it from Scripture. The redemptive word is absolutely necessary. And if we don’t think you need the Scriptures, just look at the fact that 100 years of psychology has yet to come up with a God-centered model, but the universe is God-centered. It bears testimony to the effects of sin in intellectual work.