Questioner: Having been told that the problem is out there rather than in here, many of our people assume then that all problems are solvable by either a change of scenery or association. Isn’t there a problem if we assume that all problems are even solvable? Don’t we need to bring in some aspect of a theology of suffering? Or don’t we fall into the same problem that many other counselors would fall into when we counsel people as if there’s a way to engineer a solution to any problem that is posed?

David Powlison: That’s a great question. You’ve answered it even in the question. I’ll just hark back to that metaphor of the huge hurricane. The eye is this area of the sphere of our accountability and responsibility and control. There are things that can be done and they are limited. They are always less than the need for redemption. So I think we’d want to have a vision not only of a theology of suffering, but a theology of progressive sanctification. Because it’s not only that our circumstances are not fixed until Christ comes and every tear is wiped away, but we aren’t fixed until Christ comes. And when we see him face-to-face, we will be like him. Until then, we aren’t like him fully. We are in process. So you need a theology, both of incompleteness of our personal redemption and the incompleteness of the redemption of the world. Yes, it’s crucial. I’m sitting next to the future hope guy here. So yeah, the future hope is that one day it’s all over and it’s solved and tears are wiped away and it’s all joy.

Questioner: At what point does medicine enter into Christian counsel, the use of drugs, in your viewpoint? Is it a hoax? When I grew up I was on Ritalin. I was hyperactive and told I needed drugs. Is medicine legitimate? Is this something that as pastors we’re going to need to address? I feel like if I send someone to a medical counselor, they’re going to give them counsel contradictory to the word of God even though they may need medication. So is that legitimate in your standpoint? How do we address that? And then for Dr. Piper, did the puritans have these problems with depression that we have today? It seems like with your teachings on the sovereignty of God and the joy of God that that’s a counseling in itself. You said that you felt like you were lacking in that area. Your books have counseled me incredibly in my walk with God for spiritual health.

Powlison: Boy, this is one of those a million-dollar question, 25 cent answer slots, right? I’ll just say a couple of things. Let me refer you to an article, a book review actually that Ed Welch wrote recently in the “Journal of Biblical Counseling.” It was a review of a book called Prozac Backlash by a researcher at Harvard, named Joseph Glenn Mullen. It’s got a lot in the press and a lot of spread in the secular world also. Glenn Mullen is a researcher. The interesting comment is he has looked at the totality of the Prozac research, and perhaps 75 percent of the people that take it have some kind of noticeable bump up in their mood. As he looks at it, at least two thirds of that effect is placebo effect. Placebo effect means faith. It’s the faith a person puts that something will help them. And then he says that there’s also a significant percentage of people for whom there are, ranging from mild to severely deleterious, side effects to it. The net effect, perhaps, if you started to add all the numbers is that maybe 15 or 20 percent of the people that take Prozac get some kind of medically-based unambiguous lift to their spirits. Great, they feel better.

This would be the bottom line of my own personal philosophy. Medicine is always a symptomatic relief. Now, there are times where that may be good. If someone is in depression and in such utter sludge that they are completely inert, a little bit of symptomatic relief is great. But medicine, even where there’s symptomatic relief, it never gets at the depths of the human condition. People always need counseling. So even if there may be some small percentage of people, far more minute than what the culture doses that medicine could be helpful or useful, in every case there is a spiritual issue that needs it.

I’ll give you a quick metaphor here. There was a 19th century medical proverb in teaching doctors in London, obviously you can get the provenance of that. It says, “If you hear hoofbeats outside, think horse, not zebra.” Now, if it’s in Nairobi, they’d reverse the metaphor. If you hear a person with problems, think spiritual and what’s ruling their heart, not that they have a brain tumor and so forth and so on. And it will serve you well. You can be an agnostic about medical things and still minister because every person, even the zebras, still needs spiritual care.

I’ll give you another picture. I think of it as a picture of a big oval. This is the horse community. Everybody’s a horse. There’s a smaller circle, quite small, of zebra problems. But notice that the zebra circle is inside the horse circle. Everybody needs horse doctoring. That’s you. Some people need zebra doctoring. There are some clearly definable medical issues. Later in life, you get dementia and Alzheimer’s. There are various thyroid problems. You get biologically based depressions.

So there’s also that tight circle, but then there’s a gray area. And manic depression is one of those things in the gray area. It’s hard to know how much of it is a lifestyle heart issue and how much of it is biological. I tend to think there’s probably some biological tipping that if you’re going to go nuts, that’s the way you’ll go nuts. But it doesn’t determine why you go nuts. Like for example, I will never go manic depressive. I know it. If I go nuts, I’ll get depressed. Is there some biological thing about that? Probably. We are bodies.

I have three kids. They were all hatched differently. They all have different characteristic sin patterns that you could see from birth. One wants to conquer the world and has a problem of anger. One is very self-sufficient and self-reliant, and has a problem of trust. And one is really a people person, and has a fear of man issue. And you could see that from within the first 10 minutes of their lives. Does that mean that biology defines and controls their spiritual issues? No, but our bodies in the sovereignty of God are part of the equipment with which sin and righteousness work.

John Piper: So do you prescribe medicine then?

Powlison: Do I prescribe medicine? Sometimes, though I’m not a doctor so I don’t ever prescribe. I have never, in 20 plus years of ministry, said to someone, “Go to a doctor and see if he can put you on medicine.” Now, that doesn’t mean that if there were a different group of people that I might on very rare occasions do that. I find that, maybe more to the point is that, given our culture, people are on medicine already, lots of people. Iit may be Prozac or Ritalin or things for bipolar, like lithium and so forth.

Probably more useful, to use my working philosophy if someone is on medicine. I don’t make a big deal about it. I communicate in it that I believe that the medicine has a certain symptom-alleviating effect. That’s fine, now let’s talk about your life. What I find is that most people don’t want to be on medicine. They wish they weren’t. And that when people taste the fruits of change, the power of the Spirit, the fruit of the spirit and their life’s starting to go somewhere, they initiate, “Why am I on this medicine, my life is getting better?” And they get off it.

I have known people who had been on medicine for 10 or 15 years, every medicine known to man, shock treatments, you name it. As they grew in Christ, there came a point of faith for them where they stepped off it. And again, that doesn’t answer, could there be some extremely rare sliver of the human population that medicine might be an ongoing issue? I’m willing to be agnostic in such situations. You play it as it comes in seeking to be pastorally wise.

Piper: Pastorally, my only addition to that would be that I think probably we should walk a line between creating a community of faith in which those who, for whatever reason, choose to be on medicine, feel loved and accepted in a milieu where it’s discouraged as a last resort, or something that is not the be-all-end-all. That’s very hard to do because if you say anything negative from the pulpit about medicine, the fragile people will feel hurt by it. So when I did it, I got letters and they were not happy with what I said. I said it on Easter Sunday morning, of all time. I would say everything I said again, but I would say it softer and I would put a proviso in front and at the back. And not just at the front.

So I think we want to say that we don’t want to be part of a medicated world. I mean, read this review, it’s very good. The world is discovering the problems that were problems, and nobody saw them until the researchers started doing the research on the 10 years or the 15 or 20 years of people that have been on this medicine. And now you do the research and you find out all the problems they’ve been experiencing. Suddenly the popularity of it just crashes, and you’ve got a new wave of things that comes along. That’s very helpful.

The other thing I would say is, say very plainly to the people exactly this: “What’s happening there in your feeling better is of so minor a significance in the historical realm that you should recognize the issue is are you going to heaven or are you going to hell?” When you get the world fixed with their emotions, you’ve done very little, little, almost nothing of significance to help people cope with life. That’s not the issue. That’s not what we are about mainly, just to help people feel better and cope with life. We are mainly about helping people find the Savior who will help them escape from hell and get to heaven. You can feel wonderful in this life and go to hell. Make sure you keep your priorities really clear.

With regard to the puritans, of course, this was there when they were there. And they’re the best writers on these issues. Nobody today writes like the Puritans wrote about soul care. Richard Baxter’s directory is great and Jeremiah Burrows. They wrote what we need. Go back 300 years and learn how to do soul care.

Questioner: Dr. Powlison, yesterday in your first presentation you gave us two ways or examples of how to connect through the complexities. Could you give us some more?

Powlison: I will give some more. I’ll give one more: reading, study, and thinking. One of the goals, for example, of the “Journal of Biblical Counseling” is that at one level we want to always be simple. And one of our goals is to have things in there that you can stick on the Xerox machine and give to somebody that doesn’t even have a high school degree. At the same time, we want to push the thinking of readers and practitioners of pastoral care. So our goal is to actually model the very thing that I was saying. I’m thinking about reading about issues of theology, of hermeneutics, of acts of Jesus, of church history, there are all kinds of issues of understanding our culture.

All of those things help us to think through how we bring this one simple message of the word of God that you can say that it’s Jesus Christ redeeming people from sin and misery. That’s what it all is. And yet that message gets brought to the diversities of race, culture, time, different personality types, different church settings, social strata, and different language groups. There’s all the complexities. I would probably throw that in as a third thing. I’m just going to address others on the panel to address these things.

Questioner: Many of us in the room have been following the debate over the openness of God to possibilities. I was wondering if either both of you could speak for a moment about the effect of the idea of the openness of God impacting our ability to counsel those people who are in crisis, who are in anguish or struggling with issues in their lives, and how a proper view of the character and the attributes of God conveys itself in counseling, and perhaps what negative impact an improper view of who God is and what he knows and when he knows it impacts our ability to counsel them biblically.

Piper: Well, I think it’s very good news to be able to say to a suffering person that a wise and loving God governs all things, and therefore has the capacity to take all that before and now and in the future has happened to you and turn it for your good and his glory. My bottom line counseling is that I do not think Romans 8:28 is simplistic ever. It just needs to be handled with love and care and tears.

I don’t think it’s good news to say to a girl whose life has been shattered by a husband who walked away after the first year, “God did not know he was like that when you married him or he wouldn’t have let you marry him.” Because not only is it a lie, and therefore is destructive, there is also no hope for the fact that tomorrow he may also let her stumble into something that he doesn’t have a clue what’s going to happen in the future. It gives her no hope. So I think open theism is catastrophic in its negative effect and should be opposed everywhere we can possibly oppose it, with tears, however tenderly you can do controversy here.

Powlison: I don’t know that I’ve ever ministered to someone who was directly influenced by those writers because they don’t tend to have much credence in the circles in which I operate. But it is certainly a very natural human tendency to live life as though God were not involved. And that comes up in pastoral counseling all the time. Our people live as though open theism were true and as though the universe had an open future. One of my colleagues puts it this way, “It’s as though God’s on the end of a 911 line. You get in trouble, you dial him up and then he shows up later to try to fix the mess.” I would agree, that’s catastrophic. I cannot imagine how one could do pastoral ministry to suffering people without a confidence that God is in the situation, he’s up to something, he’s up to something good in those who love him, he’s up to the refiners fire or teaching us to endure, all kinds of good things as we look at Scripture.

Just one passage that I think is delightful in this regard is 2 Corinthians 1:9. Paul talks about the fact that he’d almost been killed and then he says, “These things happened in order that I would trust no longer in myself, but in God who raises the dead.” In other words, there’s an “in order that.” There’s a purposefulness within something that almost killed you. And boy, that is such a source of hope and confidence and joy in ministry. And yet you’re doing all kinds of work. You got to help people grow up out of their juvenile implicit theologies that they serve.

Questioner: Dr. Powlison, you mentioned yesterday some feedback regarding Larry Crabb and some other Christian counselors. I wonder if you could give us, outside of you and the Westminster crew perhaps, three people that you were really impressed with their work and that you would encourage us to interact with with regards to the care of the soul.

Powlison: That’s a great question. The world of those who are committed to counsel biblically is pretty small. I liken it that the mental health system is the elephant and the Christian evangelical psychotherapy movement is the mouse and biblical counseling is the flea. Now, the flea claims it has a bazooka. It claims it. But there are really not a whole lot of people when you add it all up who have vision, commitment, training, skill, and then leadership. It’s not a large world. I would think that if you look through the authors and the bibliographies in the Journal of Biblical Counseling, you’d pretty much find the social scope of that world in terms of writers.

Hence, the way that one of those questions got answered yesterday is that I think a lot of the places where you find the strongest affirmations of the kind of things we’re committed to is in those from the past. It’s in Augustine, it’s in John Newton, it’s in Jonathan Edwards, and it’s in the Puritans. The people from the past who were Christian did not think about life from a man-centered point of view. Hence, there’s all sorts of correspondences to the kinds of things that we’re committed to.

There was a very interesting article in the journal about a dozen years ago by a pastor named Tim Keller. It was called “Puritan Resources for Biblical Counseling.” And Keller has a wonderful sense of contemporary culture, and he comments at the Puritans give us a window on a people who tackled all of the same issues like depression, the physiological component, things that we would call “domestic violence,” and addictions. It’s all there, but they tackled them in a god-centered worldview, not from within some of the constraints of the medicalistic worldview or the psychologistic worldview.

Questioner: Dr. Livingstone, you had kind of hinted at a warning with your obedient children. You said, “Watch out for that.” Can you expound on that a little bit more so I can have telltale warning signs?

Greg Livingstone: Well, there was a time when good church kids were the kids that sat in the pew and didn’t fuss and who didn’t make trouble for the pastor. And we were congratulating ourselves because they just were good kids, compliant, obedient. I’m just saying that one of my sons went to a counselor and said, “Can I be a normal person or do I have to change the world?” Now you can imagine, it isn’t very easy to be my son. I think I too slowly helped them understand that there’s different callings and that not everyone’s called to be an apostle, and that maybe they could really make their impact in pastoral care.

One of the problems was that we asked them, “Why didn’t you talk about the things that were bothering you?” And they said, “Well, because we didn’t see how our issues were very important with the big God issues.” I failed to be both/and there. Yes, there’s the big God issues and God is very interested in how much you want that baseball cap. We’re afraid to say so. Can we pray and find out a way you could get that baseball cap? I just missed some of the signals. The other thing is this. If you happen to be a good delegator, which I am, I helped my kids to be self-sufficient, but I wasn’t alongside painting the fence in the same spot, which would perhaps have let them say, “You know, I really hate church,” or whatever it might be. That’s not very professional counsel, but that’s kind of what I’m musing on.

Questioner: Dr. Piper and Dr. Powlison. Dr. Piper, you mentioned getting the eye of a poet. And I just wonder what disciplines are in place in your life and your study and your preparation so you’ve been able to make that a part of your ministry, whether it be preaching, teaching, writing or counseling.

Piper: To hear that it’s necessary is a good start. And I’m just blessed with having gone to Wheaton College and sat under Clyde Kilby who had eyes to see. I’m blessed to have read almost everything C.S. Lewis wrote. I’m blessed to have been directed to Chesterton. I’m blessed to have read the Psalms and read that the heavens are telling the glory of God. And then for some reason I’ve got this poetic bent to want to turn everything into words that compel and awaken. So put yourself in positions where you’re reading people who do it for you. If Lewis doesn’t do it for you, I don’t know who can do it for you. Nobody awakens you to see like Lewis. He called it the quiddity of things. It’s the is-ness of things. And he got it from Chesterton and MacDonald.

Chesterton used to say, “What’s weird is not the shape of your nose. What’s weird is that you have one.” When have you ever thought about how stupid a nose looks? Any nose? It’s people like that you have to get around. You have to read people like that. It doesn’t just come out of nowhere. So that would be my main advice. Read C.S. Lewis, read Orthodoxy by Chesterton. Get a volume of poems and read them. Most contemporary worship songs are bad poetry. Read good poetry.

Then just open your eyes when you leave today and look at the slush and see something in the slush and look at the sky and look at people. Be healthy. Don’t be so wrapped up in your little problems that you can’t see noses as strange and want to write a little note to somebody about how strange noses are. It’s so healthy to see the is-ness of things. God created a world, he didn’t just create ideas. He created bodies and animals.

Get “Explore Magazine” or get “National Geographic.” There’s got to be a better one out there than “Ranger Rick” has become. It used to be my favorite theological journal just because it would show you spiders that spit and fish that have electrical tails. And you just look and you say, “God, what are you up to?” And it’s so healthy to see fish that spit butterflies off of limbs in order to eat them when they fall into the water. And you say, “Evolution, no way. Absolutely no way evolution could have created a fish who spits butterflies off limbs so that it can pick it up out of the water.”

Livingstone: John, I want to give a negative testimony. Dr. Schaeffer, after scolding him for spending all the time decorating his dining hall and doing other things, said, “You know, Greg, if you’d created the world, it would’ve been black and white.”

Piper: The short answer was, expose yourself to the books and the people who see.

Questioner: Dr. Powlison, you’ve emphasized that sin works by expanding our desires, sometimes even, as you quoted Calvin — natural and good desires — such that they become so large that they are controlling lusts. And meanwhile, Dr. Piper, you like to quote from Jonathan Edwards about how sin works by shrinking our desires for God, or from C.S. Lewis who says that God finds our desires not too big but too small. One of you seems to be saying that the main issue with sin is that it overgrows our desires for things besides God. The other one seems to be saying that the main issue with sin is that it shrinks our desire for God. So I guess I’d like to hear the two of you interact on that because there seemed to me to be some significant counseling and preaching implications. I have to know what the main thing sin does is so I can go after it. I’d be interested to hear the two of you talk about it for a minute.

Powlison: I have yet to discern any difference in our view, from my reading of what John says. I think even the way you put it very nicely showed complementarity. I think probably some of the reason I have tended to come at it from the direction I have is that I have come at the issue of counseling against the backdrop of our culture, where we have the issue of, “What is a person? And what is human nature? And what’s motivation theory? And what is the is-ness of what’s going on with people?”

So I tend to come at the various theories of motivation that predominate in our culture and say, “But the Bible doesn’t describe us that way. It describes us not as having, say, this empty hole inside that hasn’t been met. It describes us as lusting after X, Y, and Z.” But one of the things I so much appreciate about John Piper is that he shows you the opposite, that the purpose of redemption is that we would just be ravished with God. And those are really just sort of fall and redemption. It’s just two sides of the same thing, as far as I can discern.

Piper: I think that’s right. Maybe the reason I tick the way I do is because in my own life and in those I know who are the most holy, the means of sanctification has not been a negative effort to reduce bad desires, but the triumph over those with superior desires for God, so that when it comes actually down to strategies of triumphing over lust and greed and fear, “Don’t be that way” has never worked for me. “Stop that. Just don’t be it. Just don’t feel that.” That’s never worked. But if you show me the holiday at the sea while I’m drinking the mud puddle of the slum, it looks like mud suddenly. That’s, I think, why I tick the way I tick.

I don’t sense anything when I read. I wouldn’t have brought him here if I thought there was this massive problem. Although sometimes when he talks about being against Crabb’s view of thinking, I wonder if there’s a problem here, because I’ve never felt that with Crabb. So I think I need to think a little more deeply about that because Larry Crabb writes to me and loves what I write. He reads it and he uses it. He had my preaching book as a required text in his counseling class. So there’s a little disconnect that does need some work here. I feel like I’m the one to learn here on what nuance it is about Crabb that I need to catch onto. Either that or you’re missing something. I don’t know, but I don’t feel it’s big, whatever it is, especially the way Crabb’s been moving these days. I don’t know. We don’t do that.

Powlison: Let me respond to the front half of what you said. Just to quote one of the Puritans. It’s the “expulsive power of a new affection.” It’s one of those lines about charm that ought to just be written on all our hearts, that it is a new affection that expels the old. And I would also want to say there is a danger of thinking that the goal is to somehow lessen our desires as though Christianity were Stoicism. Christianity is not Stoicism, it is hostile to Stoicism. It’s a passionate religion. The Psalms are so the opposite of Stoicism.

And there’s a strong Stoic strand often in conservative Protestantism. The sovereignty of God is sometimes used in a Stoic manner. “Well, God’s in control and everything’s going to work out.” Meanwhile, your 16-year-old daughter just got killed by a rapist. But God’s in control. The fact that God’s in control and your daughter was killed is the reason you are able to cry out in agony because you are not a stone, you’re a person. You cry out to a God who is in control and whom you need, and you cry for justice. And Maranatha, come Lord Jesus. The goal is not the trimming of our desires but the redirecting of our desires.

I think one of the great examples is the beginning of Romans 9 where Paul is so passionately desirous that those who don’t know Christ would know him. He pushes it to the point of saying, “I would wish I myself were accursed for them.” Now, I have known parents who are so passionately committed to getting their kids saved that they were utterly obnoxious and manipulative and controlling and just jamming the Bible down their kids’ throats. What’s the difference between Paul and them? There is a way you could say that Paul even wants their salvation more than those parents do, but Paul’s longing for the salvation of others is always governed and covered and capped by a higher glory and a higher commitment.

So he’s not going to live and die on whether person X comes to Christ, and that higher glory of God frees him to intensely long for their salvation. Whereas those parents that are such terrible parents that just manipulate and turn their kids off every way they turn, that desire of theirs is a lust. It rules their lives. It is not governed by the higher desire, by the seashore and then by the love of God.

Questioner: I appreciated and agreed with Dr. Livingstone’s comment about the missionaries. We should be just as active in raising support for our missionaries as we are in getting a salary for a pastor. I’ve long been troubled by the attitude in many churches, at least in my experience in churches that I’ve observed, where there’s this disconnectedness between the missionaries out in the field and the local congregation that is supporting them.

I’ve also been troubled by many churches that I’ve seen where they might have 30 missionary names up on the board that they send 25 or 50 dollars a month to, and each of those missionaries, they might come back on a four-year furlough and they spend the entire year traveling all across the US, going to all these different churches that each give them 50 dollars a month wearing themselves out only to go back to the field to rest. I’d just like you to comment on two things. One is, have there been any changes that you have seen taking place in the sending process for missionaries? And then secondly, what do you view to be the future of the parachurch mission organization and its relationship to the local church?

Livingstone: I think things are going in the right direction. I think churches are taking much more responsibility to come up with at least a third of their missionaries’ support. I think one of the good things happening is that if you’re going to send one, you ought to connect with some like-minded brethren and say, “How about if us five churches completely send them all from our area in Canton, Ohio so they could be with us the whole time?” There’s five Baptist churches in Detroit, whenever a candidate comes out of any of them. Then they have a formula by which they will fully support that missionary through those five churches. And of course, they’re not all the same size, so they have to work out the percentages and so forth. There could be some very creative things done which could give that person a home base, even though one church might not be able to fully underwrite them.

On the parachurch thing, I’m also applauding the local churches that decide to run their own candidate program, as they do here, or with some like-minded churches together. There’s no reason for tent makers not to be able to go out, having studied systematic theology, which they could take right from you pastors. You’re bored teaching the ABCs anyway, so have a few guys you’re teaching some theology to and some church history. But at the same time, I am grieved at the local churches who are over-claiming. They’re saying, “We’re going to send out our own missionaries and we’re going to do pastoral care.” And often, in Frontiers we would say, “Okay, you tell us how we can partner with you as a so-called parachurch organization.” Although I don’t agree with that. I agree with Ralph Winter who says, “There’s a local church and there’s the apostolic mission band, and they’re both church.” But we won’t get into all that.

But what we try to do is if the local church can do 80 percent, we’ll take 20. If they can do 50, we’ll take 50. Usually what happens is the ambitious local church that wants to send their own missionary oversteps and they find out they can’t do that, and so they ask the agency and they delegate that responsibility more. But you ought to have the attitude that this is our missionary. And a parachurch agency like Frontiers should have the attitude that says, “We have no missionaries, we only supervise other people’s missionaries that are sent from local churches.” Of course, with denominations, it’s a little different. But the local church should not give up their primary responsibility to pastoral care of those missionaries.

The OMF was shocked when Gordon Dalzell, who Errol knows, had a missionary from his local church who wanted to go with OMF. So the pastor and an elder went to meet with the OMF leaders and said, “We want to ask you questions to see if you’re good enough for our missionary.” They were shocked. They never had anybody do that before. And they said, “What are you going to do? And how are you going to provide this?” And so forth. But now the agencies are saying, “Wow, this is great. The local churches are really taking some responsibility in this partnership.” Once they got over the shock, it’s beginning to really work better and better. I don’t know if you want to say something about it.

Errol Hulse: I think it’s increasing. I think that there’s a growing awareness of the ridiculous nature of missionaries going all over the place to collect 50 dollars from each church. It’s absurd. And certainly, in Britain, the preparedness of churches to support their own missionaries I believe is on the increase, and that’s so welcomed. It’s wonderful to see.

Piper: We give a maximum 25 percent to any family, and those would be the ones who are the most connected with us. The 109 number you heard earlier I’m sure includes lots of low-number people, lots of people who get probably more than 50 dollars but not near 25 percent. So it’s an inflated number. But our policy right now is, no more than 25 percent. And whether that should increase or not, we are always open to pondering.

Questioner: Could I ask you how you came up with 25 percent? Why not more?

Piper: I don’t know. I don’t do much of this. I just preach.

Steller: That was the number that Ralph Winter advised back in 1984 or 1985 when he was one of the first speakers at one of our missions conferences, or it was a pastor’s conference, I can’t remember. But the way we do it is that we do 25 percent for them out of the church budget, and then they’re free to share their vision and their mission with others within the congregation. So oftentimes our missionaries are supported up to 50 or 60 or 70 percent from Bethlehem money, and then they raise the rest through other family and friends and other churches.

Questioner: As most of us operate in the realm of local church ministry and find that the ever-growing lists of tasks and responsibilities and expectations that are laid upon us is growing, how do we balance those expectations with what we’ve studied this week as our responsibility in an official counseling capacity? And that is, is there a balance? What is that balance between all of these other responsibilities and the time-consuming, emotionally-draining role of counselor? And is there a balance?

Hulse: I’d like to come back to an earlier question which wasn’t actually answered, and that is, which counselors would we most commend? Well, the best counselors I’ve ever known really well were Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones (who was a medical doctor and specialist), Francis Schaeffer (who’s been very highly commended today and had a tremendous impact on my life), and a living man in Britain today who’s helped a lot of pastors and is in the top league of clinical psychiatry and he’s a Reformed Puritan. And that’s Gaius Davies, who was a friend of Lloyd Jones a few years back.

What I think is so important in this realm is compassion. When I spoke to these men, they were God-centered and compassionate. There was love there. But one thing that we learned, all of us in England from Dr. Lloyd Jones, as he said, “Whatever happens, be careful of corny American counselors.” “Be careful,” he said, “always put double searchlights on them to see that they’re going to be Bible centered and not come up with corny ideas.” Thankfully, we haven’t had any corny ideas here in this conference. But let’s be God-centered.

Then coming to this question up here, the scourge in ministry is administration. It becomes 90 percent of our time with deacons and not doing the things we are called to do. And it’s essential, in my view, to build up a team in every church, to build up a team. It says something in Ephesians about recognizing gifts and putting them to work. We need that at every level so that we are not doing the things that others can do perhaps better than we can do.

In our church, we do have specialist counselors, especially for those who have been sexually abused. We have top-rate people who can deal with that because we have been dealing with hundreds of cases of those who were brought in the homeless, and we discover the real roots of their problem that goes back to abuse. This needs much specialized, careful counseling. Well, the pastors, the leading pastors could never handle all that. A team is just fabulous. We work together and we share our responsibilities. We have a superb diaconate and an eldership and the senior pastors, and that’s the way we try to keep things in hand.

One thing that hasn’t been touched in this conference at all is physical fitness. The only bit of athleticism that I’ve observed while I’ve been here is looking out from the ninth story of the Holiday Inn and watching a huge man negotiate 50 meters of ice. I thought, any moment this guy’s going to fall over and we’re going to have an earthquake here in the city. But it is a question that Dr. Livingstone nearly touched on. With our children as they grow up, if we can spend prime time with them on the things that are lawful and athletic and enjoyable, it makes a tremendous difference. And that’s not only good for us, it’s good for them. We have one son. I used to say, “Don’t watch sports on television. Do it. Let’s do it. Let’s spend that time doing it ourselves and enjoying it.” And we specialized in racquetball. In England, it’s squash. And of course, gradually he came up to the point where he could beat me. Well, that was very good for humility.

But we do need to stress this because ever so many pastors in our country break down, and they break down because they never take a day off and they never enjoy themselves. They never get out there just to be human. It’s very good to be human with your kids and do things that are healthful and give recreation. That’s biblical. And the Puritans, I noticed no questions have been asked of the Puritans probably because they said things so clearly that they don’t have to answer any questions. But anyway, to the point up there, have a good team. Aim to develop the gifts in your church and share out the workload.

Questioner: I’m thinking of a young man named David. He’s about a seventh grader, and he’s been in and out of institutions since last September when he finally acted out in a belligerent way in school. His father and mother adopted him. His father then left his mother about two years ago. His father was homosexual, and he went to live with a homosexual partner, and it seemed like the problems all began to erupt at that point. What would be the way to confront the father who seems to claim to be a Christian but also is living this lifestyle?

Powlison: In those sorts of pastoral situations you have to hold in mind each of the parties, and you’re going to do different things with the different ones. The father, who knows what can be done? He may be unreachable. He may have moved out of the area. You do what you can in terms of pastoral pursuit, in terms of reproof, in terms of church discipline, in terms of the desire to claim him from what is wrong. And it’s those sorts of lifestyles where the fierce part of the ministry of the word in the last analysis finally comes on the table, the warnings and such that you cannot continue this way and live.

Then there’s the boy. And with a child, it seems to me that always your first goal is, from a pastoral standpoint, to try to work and equip and oversee and consult with those who already have a relationship with him. So I’d be very concerned to work with the mom, with perhaps the youth worker, with teachers, with friends and if at all possible, just help them to know how to love him and how to draw him out and how to challenge him and how to teach him and how to be patient with him and all of the things that are part of a young boy facing something which is a very devastating suffering. It’s a very confusing form of sociocultural conditioning, as it were, at the micro level.

There’s the mom and the pastoral care there. So bottom line, I suppose, if I were the pastor of that family, I’m trying to keep in mind each of the parties. And in this particular case, each of the parties has a very different kind of approach that I would take.

Piper: I think if Newton were here, he would say, “55 years ago, God, in his sovereignty, ordained that Greg Livingstone be passed from foster home to foster home so that on January 31, 2001, he would stand in this room and tell you that story so that you could home and tell that seventh grader that story.

Questioner: Dr. Powlison, you mentioned the five steps to effectiveness, to becoming effective, Dr. Powlison. And a number of years ago I became convinced of the vision and the commitment part. I seem to be stalled on the training part because I have gone out and bought all kinds of J. Adams’s books and read those. I’ve heard you express some misgivings about some of his views. Then I went to an International Center for Biblical Counseling Conference because it had “biblical counseling” in it, and found I think that their views might be somewhat at variance with yours. If I want to be trained as far as formal training, supervised training, and if I want to help build a team, as Dr. Hulse has brought out, in my church, where can we get this training, given that you said the cadre is rather small? What are the resources other than the books you mentioned?

Powlison: At an educational level, that I know of, there are no other seminaries besides Westminster in Philadelphia that have a philosophical commitment to let the authority of Scripture, a presuppositional view of reality, and the grace of Christ be what drives counseling at the level of the MDiv and the DMin. I wish I could say that there are 50 seminaries that are committed that way, but there aren’t. I can speak about our own seminary. We have masters programs both at the MA level, a two-year program, the MDiv level, which is a three year, and the DMin, which is a two weeks at the end of each summer for a couple of years and then a project. Those are at least a few things in the direction of educational offerings.

But by and large, the problem has been that those committed to biblical counseling to date have largely been pastors who later in their life realized that what they’d been doing in counseling just didn’t cut it. What they had gotten in seminary didn’t cut it. They had a kind of midlife conversion and had been sort of picking up hodgepodge this-that to make up for lost time. That’s the typical pattern of someone who gets committed to biblical counseling. There has not been much penetration into the places where pastors initially get trained, into the Christian colleges and the seminaries. If you take a counseling course, 99 out of a hundred times, it will be by and large a rehash of secular theories and a few practical tips, some of which are sort of more or less common sense and reasonably okay, like listening to people and stuff like that. But you’re not going to get a vision for counseling ministry that is coherent with what right down the hall you’re getting in your systematics class and your exegesis classes.

In one of my closing points last night I spoke about the need for educational institutions. I’ll give one other anecdote. In the Southern Baptist churches, both southeastern down in the Carolinas and southern in Louisville have wanted to be committed to biblical counseling. Al Mohler and Paige Patterson have had a terrible time finding qualified, committed people to teach. They’ve wanted to clean house. They’ve wanted to get the liberalism and the secular psychology out of those departments, and they just cannot find people.

Now they’re making a start, and particularly Southeastern seminary. Well, actually now, Southeastern has two men who are very committed to biblical counseling vision. They are wise men, good guys who are trying to develop a program down there. Southern has got a man, Eric Johnson, who came from this church who thinks in a presuppositional way. He has a Reformed world and life view. I think he’s a good first start for Southern. He’s not a practical theologian. He’s more of a thinker and a scientist and that sort of thing, but he at least is a voice for biblical worldview thinking in the area of counseling. But Southern still has not been able to find someone who’s more of a counselor type to be part of their faculty.

Questioner: I’m just wondering where to go from here. There are no videotapes, no distance education, or anything that you’re aware of?

Powlison: These aren’t seminary courses, but there are some videotapes right out and across the hall there. Those would be like a seven-hour version, which at least is the helicopter fly by. It’s not looking at each tree in the forest, but at least a panorama of the forest in terms of a model. It’s the tape that Paul Tripp and myself put together. It’s at least a start that gives you the worldview.

Hulse: I do think that we all need help. In this way, sometimes we think of counseling as something so complex, so vast, so specialized that we just have to go back to the simplicity of the Puritans. But we do need counsel as to what books we should give preference to. Let me give you an example. A pastor friend of mine in South Africa had an appalling experience where his wife went out to work, a car crashed into her car, she was killed, he ran out, and she died in his arms.

A friend in South Africa, quite well known, who specializes in counseling the bereaved simply said to his wife, “I’m going to go and live with this brother for several weeks. So forgive me, I’m going to go and help.” And he went and lived with this pastor for three weeks, which was sheer therapy to him. And he has learned through doing it, through counseling terrible cases of bereavement, what you don’t do and what you do do. We just need the basics. I’d love to read books recommended by our brother, but they mustn’t be 10,000 pages. We want books that tell us the basics. We really do need help like that on so many issues because sometimes there are no specialists there to help us when we need them. So we look forward to the commendations of the books we must give preference to.

Questioner: I find myself becoming increasingly skeptical, cynical, and even critical of the medical community regarding meds and depression. My question really centers around, to what degree do you trust the medical community in the area of the brain and the issuance of meds? And to what degree do meds help or keep one from dealing with spiritual issues in our lives?

Powlison: Maybe the best thing I could do is actually point you to a resource because last year in the journal we actually ran two consecutive volumes on depression.

Questioner: I’ve read them.

Powlison: You’ve read them? Well, there’s a lot in there that points at that issue. What more could I add in a nutshell? I suppose if I were to say one thing, it would be that our knowledge as those involved in pastoral ministry of the human condition is more solid knowledge than medical knowledge. We are on sure ground, and we can go forward with confidence. And there’s an improper fealty and submission that we can show towards the medical profession and adoration and idolization of them. There’s also a sort of radical, throw your glasses away and walk, foolish despising the fact that God has given us bodies and there are genuine advances in technology.

And there’s some third way you try bump your way towards in the middle that is skeptical and agnostic on the one hand, and yet properly appreciative on the other. Those things where medicine gets into the human soul and the problems in living are when on its most shaky ground. Medicine is on a lot shakier ground there than it is when it’s fixing a compound fracture or heart disease. And so you take whatever they’ve got with huge grains of salt. That said, there are going to be times where someone is inert. I’m not unwilling to kind of see what happens medically. And if that can give them a kickstart that lets us counsel then great. That’s not granting the medical profession a whole lot, but it’s giving something there.

Piper: We’re going to live with that tension. This really is one of Newton’s things that we muddle through, and you feel it on the issue of say, nutrition. The nutritionists and the special medicine folks who think there might be some better ways to keep yourself healthy than antibiotics or whatever, we’re going to live with that tension. Some doctors just have their heads in the sand. They just don’t have the time or the interest to figure out whether or not certain ways of eating might be worth commending to their patients instead of just slapping on the latest prescription. And on the other hand, we love our doctors, we love our doctors. We go to them and we’ll pay them anything and say, “Make me feel better for Sunday. Get rid of this sore throat.” So we’re going to live with this tension.

I think the psychological thing is the same thing. You got med-happy doctors all over the place. They don’t have any more time than you do. They’ve got 15 minutes set aside with this person who just came to them first with their immobilizing depression. Doctors are going to give them a prescription. Most doctors are not going to send them away without any help. They’re going to put them on medicine, boom, right away and tell them, “You probably should see a counselor.” And we may feel, oh, that’s too fast. Why’d you do it that way? But that’s going to happen. So I don’t think it’ll do any good to get on a crusade against doctors or a crusade on anti-meds or crusade for nutrition or against nutrition. Help your people think critically. Help your people realize these tensions exist, and then we all muddle through.

Questions: My question narrows in on the tension that Dr. Piper talked about regarding Larry Crabb. When I heard you, Dr. Powlison, on Monday night, mention that the view that sees our need for being loved as neutral, and what makes it sinful is finding other things to fill that void instead of God, leaves the essential desire to be loved and that idolatry unchallenged. The first thing I thought was, could someone apply the same type of a criticism to Christian Hedonism which says that the desire to be happy is fundamental to who we are, and it’s only wrong when we seek to be happy in other things besides God. I mean, maybe there’s something fundamentally different about Edwards’s self-love from the kind of felt needs that we camp in on and make idols of. I wonder if the two of you could respond to that.

Piper: While he’s thinking, I heard that and I’ve thought about it, wondering what the difference is and whether or not Christian Hedonism simply is the preservation of an idol that ought to be undercut. I don’t think that question is any different than the question I’ve struggled with for 20 years. Consider the example of the health, wealth, and property people. They’re using prayer as a means of getting what they want. Others use other means of getting it, and it doesn’t solve the problem that it’s still idolizing health or still idolizing wealth or whatever.

I come along and say, “God is to be your idol. God is to be your lust.” Now, if that’s a failure to unseat the God of lust, I have to rethink my whole system. I think lust was created by God. That’s dangerous to use because you used the word lust in a bad sense. But I mean desires and passions. I hardly ever use the word “need,” so I don’t find myself tracking with that word. But I think my heart is a desire factory. I think it’s that way because I was made to be that way, and God made me that way so that I would be a chronic worshiper. Can’t help myself from worshiping, as long as my spiritual eyes are open and I see God as beautiful, infinitely desirable, and the highest treasure of the universe. Therefore I’m not on a crusade to unseat the God of lust. I’m on a crusade to say everybody has lusts, and I want to unseat every idol but God. Now, tell me if that’s contrary to what you’re saying.

Powlison: I don’t think it is. The way I might put it is what I alluded to briefly yesterday. The human heart is an active verb. What do you desire? Do you desire God or do you desire . . . ?” And then fill in the list. What do you love? What do you fear? Where do you set your hopes? Where do you take refuge? What brings you joy? And you can go on and on and on. And every single verb is either defined with God as its object or something else. And that’s how you uncover the defections of the human heart.

The thing where when I see the intrusion of what I would call secular psychological models, particularly from humanistic psychology into Christendom, is where something else gets defined first. In fact, if John were saying, “Well, what I need is happiness. Let’s build everything around this need for happiness. And then God happens to be the best or the truest or the only way to actually meet the need, but then the universe gets defined around my need for happiness.” I would say that if that were what he’s saying, which I’ve never read him that way, I think it would be in the same category as the health and wealth or the more psychologized view of man. But if what we say is our need is God, then we’ve gotten ourselves off on the right foot. We’re in a God-centered universe. We were made to depend on him.

In fact, if we want to use the word need, I would tend to come at it this way and say, “Well, what do we need?” We need God. We are dependent on him willy-nilly. We are creatures. We need his good favor because if we don’t have his good favor, we die. So we need God’s good favor. We need perfect fidelity to him to have his good favor or we’re under wrath. We need a Savior because we are under wrath, because we are apostates and drifters and idolaters and fabricators. We need Christ because he is the Savior from our sins. We need the Holy Spirit to make us new so that we will awaken again that we need God, and we’ll come to light. If I wanted to use the word need, I’d want to run it in a clearly God-centered way.

But words have lots of meanings. That’s why I try to do this sort of lowercase, uppercase thing. There’s nothing wrong with the word “need.” Or think of someone that comes out of the drug culture and they say, “Jesus is the greatest high. He’s a better high than dope.” Is that proper or improper to say that? I’d want to say, as long as that person is using it with a lower case, it’s okay. If he puts it in uppercase and says, “Well, I’ve got this need for a high and I used to think dope would meet it. But since I have a need for a high, the Lord Jesus is the best high. So he meets my need for a high.” If that’s what he’s meaning, if he’s turning it into a technical terminology, a kind of systematic theology of my need for a high, then I would say it’s gone sour.

So I’d say the same thing about happiness or about love and all these things. Ecstasy is the gift of God and health and wealth and joy and being loved and being significant. And all those things are gifts of God and natural affections. We want them all. We are wired by God to know the difference between a blessing and a curse. We know that heaven is heaven and hell is hell, and we’re wired to know that. But I want to put that fundamental religious covenantal issue, God of the idols at the starting point, not later. And I think you do that.

Piper: Here’s the most pointed way I know to clarify this issue. I think the most penetrating critical question somebody can ask me is, “Do you make a God out of happiness?” And here’s my standard answer: “No. You make a God out of what you are most happy in.” What that does in his terminology is show that happiness is an active verb. It’s not the pot at the end of the rainbow. It’s the function of the heart in the pursuit of the pot, who is God. Happiness is a given. Everybody’s committed to it as a function.

In a sense, it’s paradoxical to talk about happiness as the goal. Happiness is the function that embraces a goal. When the goal is good enough, pleasing enough, we experience the satisfaction of that function. The gold is God. And you make a God out of whatever you find most satisfaction or happiness in. So I find right at that point, “Does John Piper make a God out of happiness,” which is what David wants to distance himself from? And I’m saying, “No, I hope not. We all make God out of whatever we take or find most happiness in.”

Powlison: The other thing I’d say is that if you make a God out of happiness, then you couldn’t write a book about the place of affliction in the lives of those three people, as you just did. You couldn’t sing, pray, think, and live the Psalms of sorrow and heartache and dismay. Because if your God is happiness, then if life’s going tough and you were looking to God, then God let you down and then you’re bitter and so on. So it’s very functional in the end whether you can tell what someone’s making a God out of. Because if your God doesn’t deliver, then you abandon him for another one. But if God is your goal, the joy and the sorrow and the other variables, they’re all okay. They’re all within it.

Questioner: As a worship pastor, each of you has had a tremendous amount of effect and input into my particular area of discipline. I don’t do the preaching every Sunday, but I’m responsible for the shaping of our corporate worship. I would like to hear from each of you. What is it in the things that are going on in the trends in corporate worship that you see are positive changes that you would see are positive? Or maybe what you would immediately see as a change that you think is necessary that you’re not seeing yet?

Hulse: Well, last night I gave a very generous gift to Dr. Piper, which was our new hymn book called “Praise,” which consists of about 450 of the best of the old that we’ve been singing in this conference. And 450 then there are 450 stupendously fine, good quality hymns that have been composed over the last 10, 20, 30, or 40 years brought into a book. I would say an answer to that question, in England, is that the tension is between the charismatics and the conservatives. The conservatives are terrified of charismatics. And even the name Graham Kendrick sends terror into some of our conservatives.

The other day I did a little survey with 25 of our young people in one group that’s been converted in the last three years. I did hymnology with them starting with Bernard of Clairvaux: “Jesus, the very thought of thee with sweetness fills my breast.” And we went through the centuries and I did it by way of quiz, asking them if they ever knew or heard of these people. When we got up to Charles Wesley, about three of them had heard of Charles Wesley. One or two had heard of Isaac Watts. When we came to Graham Kendrick, I said, “Do you know who Graham Kendrick is?” Not one new. So I said, “Well, look, have a guess.” So one girl put her hand up, “He was a monk.”

So it shows really that this terror is not warranted. Let’s sing the things that honor God. And we’ve got to always come back to basics. In all our worship, we’ve got basic criteria by which we know whether it’s going to honor God or not. Is it biblical? Are we expressing the truth? Are we doing it with all our hearts? And that’s a cultural thing. I mean, for singing, you’ve got to go to Africa. We Europeans, most of us, need a tremendous amount of help because we are not very good at it.

We’ve just had a conference in England and we had a paper devoted to this very question of contemporary worship, and it all comes back to an examination of what is biblical. And we have freedom to express our joy, providing we can show that this is what they did in the Scriptures. That’s all we’ve got. I’m afraid these tensions are not going to go away. The only way they’re going to go away is by example. When we show that we greatly enjoy exuberance in our worship, we worship God and we’ve got no hidden agenda, we’re not going to overcome people with mania of any kind. It is just not going to happen. But in Britain this is a very big tension and problem, and we hope we’re going to make progress in it. But there’s no ready solution on it. It’s just always back to examination from the Scriptures about what we are doing.

Powlison: I’ll throw in a brief comment. This is a very small comment compared to that. One of the things I most like about what’s happening in contemporary worship is an increasing sense that worship can be largely conducted in the first and second persons and not just in the third person. It’s singing to God and not simply about God.

Now, I give a simple example, the way that the worship leader in our church has just tweaked an old hymn. The final line of that old hymn, the final verse goes, “Jesus, I do now receive him. More than all, in him I find.” We just changed it into the direct address. “Jesus, I do now receive you . . .” And I think that’s been a wonderful development within some contemporary worship. It’s a sensitivity to not just singing about God but singing to God. And I think that that has come out of the charismatic movement, largely a concern for more direct and personal kind of worship rather than a more theological discussant kind of worship. It’s the faith that is believed kind of worship rather than the faith that believes kind of worship that goes right to God.

Livingstone: I think that’s right. I think we are lacking in integrity if we don’t give the charismatic movement a lot of credit. I already described the Baptist church I was saved in. In the bulletin, we didn’t even use the word “worship.” We called everything before the sermon “preliminaries.” Can you believe that? Preliminaries? I didn’t know how to express my affection to God in corporate worship until recent years. Whatever you think of some of the other disasters in the various branches of movements, I think we have to give them some credit for waking us up so that you can tell Jesus out loud that you love him.

Piper: One of the things this conference stands for — it’s one of our five goals at the beginning, is worship — so I’m going to put in the cautionary note here as one who’s passionately committed to meeting God in corporate worship with the heart and the head is this. Sam Crabtree, I’ll give you credit for this. He’s the executive minister here. “Beware of loving loving God more than loving God.” It’s a danger. It’s worth taking the risk to cultivate a public loving God and realizing some of your people are going to commit idolatry with their eyes closed and their hands lifted. You just need to teach that very carefully. And then you lead them forward in real affectionate love to God, taking all those risks. But you tell them the danger exists. This guitar, when it goes into that little thing and this interesting strain that the keyboard can do behind a thing that can cause a certain emotion to rise, there’s nothing especially spiritual about that necessarily. And worship leaders better be painfully aware that you can work an audience with music like no other humorist or orator can work an audience. All of that and the instruments are there, they’re there, I want them there. So it’s worth the risk.

But the point is this, this conference exists to say that truth matters. Edward said, “My goal is to lift the affections of my people as high as I possibly can, provided I lift them with truth and with affections that are proportional to the nature of the truth with which they’re lifted.” Preach that. Worship leaders, get that. Teams in church leadership, get together and talk that through. Make educated people whose emotions and heads are functioning together, and that’ll have a wonderful sifting effect on what you use and how you do it on Sunday morning.

Questioner: You were mentioning, Dr. Powlison, that we are not against psychology. We’re not just saying that the Bible is comprehensive about every subject so that there are some extra biblical truths that we keep our minds and eyes open to, and yet we don’t want to be integrationist. My question is, if we are opening our thoughts to extra biblical truths and some other areas of things we want to glean to try to be good counselors and interactive communicators with people, at what level are we not integrating something there when we’re reading other people who have studied people? And how does that then play especially with the idea of when we start to build structures and things like that within our own ministries and ministry teams and so forth? You mentioned having also the minister of counseling. Are we not setting up in effect similar kinds of things as secular counseling has done where we have the counselor professional? What distinguishes when we’ve crossed the line of integration with being wise discerners of extra biblical truth?

Powlison: Boy, talk about a big question to ask it right at the end in a couple of minutes. Let me point you to a reference first that’ll really give more fully my own views on this that I obviously believe are true. In the book that David Livingstone waved the other night, Psychology and Christianity: Four Views, I alluded to Gary Collins’s view in that. I talk about what we mean by the word psychology. And one of the things I would just say to all of us is, don’t ever think of psychology with a capital P and in the singular. There is no such thing as Psychology. The starting point of sane thinking is that there are many different modern Western psychologies that are influential in our culture. If you can even think that way, it’s off to a very good start.

I’ll give you another example of this. We would never say, “What do you think about religion?” Because there are religions. Aren’t there? There are psychologies. There are many of them. And then in the rest of the article, I sort of take apart the semantic field and describe six different meanings of the word “psychology.” One is completely positive. You are a psychological being. Faith is an experience. Emotions are psychological experiences. Are you against psychology in that sense? No. You are psychology. You are what we want to understand. That’s just the stuff that all the different systems try to make sense of. So meaning number one is perfectly good.

Meaning number two is the observations about human nature and behavior. And there’s a lot that you can learn from someone who calls themselves a psychologist in that sense, just like you can from a historian, a sociologist, a novelist, the daily newspaper, and the Muslim neighbor next door. The thing that at every point I try to argue against is granting “psychology” any epistemological authority that’s at any level higher than “Reader’s Digest” and the daily newspaper.’ It has no higher authority. It’s not science that you bow before, it’s just men (usually fallen and twisted), but they observe life. So just the same way you talk to your Muslim neighbor next door, he’s not stupid. He can tell you things. He can describe experiences and you can learn something from it. But you don’t grant it epistemological authority. So there’s that observational level that is shaped by a person’s worldview. So you got to come even at the observations very discerningly.

The third level is theory. That’s completely loaded. That’s a set of eyeglasses different from the truth, unless it’s a biblical vision. The fourth level is therapy. That’s completely loaded because it is an attempt to change what is in a fallen world. It’s an attempt to do a redemption either towards God in Christ or towards something else. The fifth meaning of the word is as an institutional setup, like the mental health system. The sixth meaning of the word is what you could call a popular ethos. We live in a therapeutic society, a psychologized society. I want us to be highly suspicious of meanings 3, 4, 5, and 6, very discerning about meaning two, and jump in with both feet in terms of figuring out meaning one and sort out what it means to think Christianly.

I think if you just simply take psychology off of the epistemological pedestal and put it on the same level as “Reader’s Digest” and “USA Today,” then you’re not going to get converted by it. You read the newspaper without becoming a materialist or a gossip monger. So you could read Sigmund Freud and you realize, this guy’s a brilliant guy and he observes all kinds of stuff and he’s also totally wrong at the same time. And that approach towards secular knowledge is what John Calvin in our tradition is the great pioneer of. He has this way of looking at the Greek philosophers and saying, “These guys are brilliant.” You read the Stoics. They were such students of human nature. And then you turn around and you read the very next page. These guys were so blind and so confused, and they didn’t know which way was up. And they are cold and sterile.

Sometimes people wonder, is Calvin contradictory? And he’s actually not. When you’ve got biblical eyes for everything in the world around you, you realize the way in which people around you, whether they’re formal writers, like a psychologist, or a sociologist, or a historian, or a philosopher, or whether they’re just Joe. My uncle, who managed a shipyard, was a profane man but was one of the most profound analysts of human nature I’ve ever known. He was totally in the service of his pride and to destroy people. But he observed people and he could spot religious hypocrisy from a mile away. But I would never for a moment want to buy his worldview. It was a horrible worldview, but he wasn’t stupid. It seems to me that biblical thinking is able to say both, as John Calvin really pioneered for us as Protestants.