I am working on a long journal article which hopes to address a dispute going on in biblical counseling at the moment. The following is a section from the work which has consumed most of a spare time over the past many weeks. It is very rough as can be seen from footnotes left dangling mdisentence.
The sides to the discussion cannot quite agree on either the scope of “common grace” or the word “counseling.” Such disputes can be swept aside as merely linguistic, but a fundamental point of disagreement does remain.
Part of the dispute is supported by the difference over “counseling.” A word contains within its “meaning” the seed of an argument. If “counseling” does entail emotional and psychological support, indeed, “therapy”; then, one who uses “counseling” to involve primarily instruction but not such supportive therapy may appear unloving or unkind. Part of that sense will derive from the expectation of the word.
If a child comes home from college and his mother is perfectly polite but bears the distance of a cordial waitress, the child will wonder why his mother is unkind. Precisely the same behavior from one at a restaurant may be though charming. The difference would be the expectation. Likewise, the word “counseling” may tempt us to see a counselor as unkind.
Yet, I will grant that too many who call themselves “biblical counselors” have been not merely unkind on the scale of a “therapist” but have been positively unchristian in their behavior. I will go further and admit, even charge, that too often “biblical counseling” has not been “biblical.”
And so, I have granted much in the way of critique if not the precise rationale from those exemplified by SETS’s recent journal. But I want to go further and grant more ground to Professor Brooks. I will take his side on the “common grace” divide at least this far: The influence of God in this world is not merely through special revelation. There are the secondary effects of Christianity and Scripture in a culture (see, for example, Holland’s history Dominion). There are the positive effects which the Spirit has had influencing even unbelievers as also termed “common grace.”
I will add to that. A hard line between the “spiritual” and the “natural” life is artificial. Let us say that “biblical counseling” has been foolish. At this point, I am going to suggest that it is Brooks who has not gone “far enough,” with the implications of his use of the phrase “common grace” in that he sees an artificial cleavage in humanity:
Counseling is ultimately a discipline concerned with proper human functioning and this means it will always involve two planes. The plane of a human being functioning in their relationship with God and the plane of a human being’s functioning as a creature.[1]
Above, I noted above, there is an implicit charge that MacArthur and by extension biblical counseling had taken a gnostic and behavioristic tone. Here, it seems to me that Brooks and indeed those who argue that we should integrate such things into our “spiritual” discipline are perhaps shading gnostic with a harder cleavage between “spiritual” and “physical.” As I hope to make plain and convincing, there is no parceling of human life into “natural” and “supernatural” or “spiritual” and “psychological.” When I look around the human life, I cannot find a spiritual component here and a psychological component there. The failure to find a mind lurking in the folds of the brain cuts two ways. The materialist has imported a degree of Descartes’ (and whether Descartes is the culprit here or merely the shorthand makes no difference to my argument) brain – mind split. There is no metaphysical switch in the pineal gland.[2]
I find no such segregation in the Scripture, but rather the difficult term “heart” as standing indistinctly for those things which are modern education has taught us to carefully segregate. When we begin with the appropriate assumption, we can find that the Scripture actually provides us with a comprehensive counseling methodology.
The “necessary” implicit assumptions of clinical psychology to function as a “science” [3] must be a rejection of the minimal elements of Christianity. Certain aspects of Christian culture still remain as goods in the wider culture, although without the accepted intellectual weight of Scripture things previously consider verboten are now “rights” and even “human rights” and it is bigotry to reject what was considered sufficiently “obvious” as to not need argument.
This change in the nature of the culture will have multiple effects upon what constitutes “clinically informed” or empirical. The changes in the culture will have effect upon the pressures brought to bear upon human beings which will show itself in the way in which these various pressures stress people. People will respond in various ways to relieve the stress, which will include ways previously not permissible but not considered healthful. The ways in which the therapist helps will change over the course of time. These various changes (and others) will be constrained by social and political pressures and influence and caged about by Overton’s Window.
If I were to say, “well this clinically determined is true but that is political but not science” I have merely set up my own boundaries and have become a gatekeeper myself. I will only accept science before 2000 or 1990 or 1950 does not seem like a viable solution. This shifts the entire argument over to one’s philosophy of science.
The space is a morass. But I do not think the solution to this dispute is disputing over “science” or “common grace.” I have become convinced (and am even more after viewing the present disputes) that such an argument is misdirected.
At this point, I will be able to do little more than illustrate rather than detail a methodology. However, it should be readily apparent that any lack of biblical counseling lies with an under-developed theology derived from Scripture rather than an underdeveloped Scripture in need of help from others whether Maslow, or van der Kolk, or Koestler’s Ghost in the Machine (whose tri-partite brain theory seems to be used by van der Kolk; they at least share the same concept), or Shapiro, or (if I am feeling antiquarian) Freud, James, or Jung, or whoever meets the current standard for “clinically informed. I will stipulate that all of them are “right.” I have read them all. They have all made think about things I may not have considered. They have provoked me to rethink what I have thought I knew. None of them have taught me how to be a Christian[4].
[1] https://rts.edu/resources/herman-bavinck-patron-saint-of-biblical-counselors/
[2] “The pineal gland is a tiny organ in the center of the brain that played an important role in Descartes’ philosophy. He regarded it as the principal seat of the soul and the place in which all our thoughts are formed.” (Lokhorst, Gert-Jan. 2013. “Descartes and the Pineal Gland (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford.edu. 2013. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/.)
[3] If we are going to be biblical, we must posit at a minimum a Creator. However, the concept of Creator is a place at which “science” draws the line:
Creation “ex nihilo” means creation “from nothing” and has been found to be an “inherently religious concept.” McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255, 1266 (ED Ark. 1982). The District Court in McLean found: “The argument that creation from nothing in [§] 4(a)(1) [of the substantially similar Arkansas Balanced Treatment Act] does not involve a supernatural deity has no evidentiary or rational support. To the contrary, ‘creation out of nothing’ is a concept unique to Western religions. In traditional Western religious thought, the conception of a creator of the world is a conception of God. Indeed, creation of the world ‘out of nothing’ is the ultimate religious statement because God is the only actor.” Id., at 1265.
(Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) 482 U.S. 578, 600, fn. 2) Edwards was used in a later case in support of the argument that Intelligent Design is not “science”:
The Supreme Court further held that the belief that a supernatural creator was responsible for the creation of human kind is a religious viewpoint and that the Act at issue “advances a religious doctrine by requiring either the banishment of the theory of evolution from public school classrooms or the presentation of a religious viewpoint that rejects evolution in its entirety.” Id. at 591, 596. Therefore, as noted, the import of Edwards is that the Supreme Court made national the prohibition against teaching creation science in the public school system.
(Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (M.D. Pa. 2005) 400 F. Supp. 2d 707, 718) A simple examination demonstrates that any number of overtly “spiritual” conceits are all permissible as “psychology.” “Take this opportunity to enrich your spiritual life. Meditate, journal, pray, create daily spiritual practices, read spiritually uplifting writings.” (“Resorting to Psychics in Uncertain Times | Psychology Today.” n.d. Www.psychologytoday.com. Accessed June 7, 2024. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/400-friends-who-can-i-call/202008/resorting-psychics-in-uncertain-times.) There is a strange interplay between spiritual concerns and science. (See, e.g., Josephson-Storm, Jason A. 2017. The Myth of Disenchantment Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. University Of Chicago Press.)
[4] See generally,
memoirandremains 