What Did David Powlison Teach about Scripture and Psychology?
Editor’s Note: This week’s mini-series on the Grace and Truth blog addresses the history of the biblical counseling movement. In this final article, Nate Brooks discusses David Powlison’s writings on the relationship between divine revelation and secular psychology. In other contributions to the series, Daniel Kim explores the relevance of the “priesthood of all believers” within the context of church counseling ministries, and Jared Poulton considers the influence of Cornelius Van Til on Jay Adams’ ministry.
In 1988, The Journal of Pastoral Practice (later renamed the Journal of Biblical Counseling) published a dense academic article on how ego and behavioral psychologies describe and engage people’s defensiveness differently than the Scriptures. The author was largely unknown, with a brief note attached that David Powlison was a “counselor and faculty member at CCEF.”[1]Thirty-one years later, David’s final article ran in that same publication, a goodbye address to the 2019 graduating class of Westminster Theological Seminary—remarks he was too ill to give in person.[2]In between these two articles, David Powlison published (by my count) 126 other pieces in the Journal of Biblical Counseling. Undoubtedly, this literary legacy continues to significantly shape biblical counseling as a discipline in countless ways.
This small article zeroes in on Powlison’s writing on the relationship between divine revelation and secular psychology. What should biblical counselors do with the reams of secular knowledge about human beings possessed by those whose frameworks for counseling differ so vastly from our own? Time and again, he would return to this theme, seeking to build a theory of counseling that would rightly map the shaky ground between theology and psychology.
Holding Things in Tension?
David Powlison’s writings on the nature of counseling are the outworking of trying to hold in tension two vital concepts. On the one hand, he was absolutely committed to the idea that the Bible was the finest explainer of people in the entire universe. No amount of sociological data, no secular theory, no empirical study could ever hope to come close to the Scriptures in wisely interpreting the complexity of human nature, identity, experience, and action. On the other hand, Powlison was also deeply committed to the idea that the Bible did not contain everything that could be helpful in aiding transformation. Consider the two following quotations, taken from his 1999 article “Affirmations and Denials: A Proposed Definition of Biblical Counseling”:
We deny that Christless counseling—whether psychotherapeutic, philosophical, quasi-religious, or overtly religious—is either true or good. Their messages are essentially false and misleading, competing with Christ.
We deny that the Bible intends to serve as an encyclopedia of proof texts containing all facts about people and the diversity of problems in living.[3]
For Powlison, the Bible was the finest counseling book in the universe, and yet it did not contain everything that could be useful in addressing “the diversity of problems in living.” In other words, the content of the Bible is central, authoritative, necessary, and relevant to biblical counseling. And at the same time, biblical counseling is not hostile to information outside of the Bible that God wants us to know to aid in the transformation of people into His image.
Holding these two points in tension was not a later development in Powlison’s literary career but rather can be seen from some of his earliest articles published with CCEF. In his 1988 article, “Crucial Issues in Contemporary Biblical Counseling,” he wrote strongly of the need to reject secular psychology:
Secular psychologies remain major enemies of the church in the late 20th century. We face a zoo of systems united by only one thing. At best, ‘god’ is a comforting auxiliary to the human psychic drama. At worst, he/she/it is a delusion.…We must continue to ‘think biblically,’ letting biblical categories lead our understanding. We must continue to reject secular categories from a self- consciously presuppositional standpoint.[4]
Yet in the same article, he also later affirmed the need to “appreciate, redeem, and reframe” those very psychologies he urged the church to reject:
Perhaps it seems a paradox, but the final crucial issue for contemporary biblical counseling is the need to define more clearly the nuances in our relationship to secular thinking. The relationship of presuppositional consistent Christianity to secular culture is not simply one of rejection. Half of what biblical presuppositions give us is a way to discern the lie that tries to make people think about themselves as autonomous from God. But the other half of what biblical categories do is give us a way of appreciating, redeeming, and reframing the culture of even the most godless men and women.[5]
Powlison does not see these two concepts as contradictory. Rather, they’re a paradox, reminiscent of the paradoxical commandment to both rebuke and not rebuke a fool according to his folly in Proverbs 26:4-5. Powlison urges biblical counselors to both reject secular psychology and not reject secular psychology within the span of only a few pages.
How do we make sense of this? One of his final articles on counseling methodology provides help in solving this riddle. Titled “How Does Scripture Teach Us to Redeem Psychology?”, Powlison writes in 2019 that:
When psychotherapists address the manifold sufferings and sins that impel people to seek therapy or to read a self-help book, the same failure to reckon with God generates an inescapable shallowness. Secular therapists describe troubled people so vividly! Their desire to help is so palpable! But their answers and solutions are always so disappointing. Given that the core human pathology is inertial self- centeredness, it is striking how those who testify to healing still sound sick.[6]
Alongside this, Powlison also affirms that secular psychology is not to simply be rejected, but aids the biblical counselor in providing wise, God-honoring counsel.
Secular researchers and clinicians know reams of significant facts about people and problems, about strengths and weaknesses… Secular therapies often embody helpful skills in knowing, in loving, and in speaking so as to catch the ear of strugglers….We gain much and lose nothing by being appropriately attentive to and appreciative of their strengths.[7]
Powlison never affirmed secular theories in their entirety. They were always, for him, a dead-end street, a dammed river, an ineffective tool that would ultimately fail to chisel away the soul’s detritus. Person-centered therapy was lifeless, family systems hollow, and cognitive behavioral therapy short on glory. And yet, Powlison never consigned such theories entirely to the dustbin of irrelevancy. He encouraged biblical counselors to be “appreciative of their strengths” and to recognize that biblical counselors could “gain much” from understanding secular psychotherapeutic systems. He was no integrationist, fitting a secular theory into a generalized biblical grid, yet he was also not one who saw only folly in the work of those who did not know God.
(Mis)Quoting Powlison
We all, as biblical counselors, are stewards of the literary contributions of David Powlison to our discipline. He was wise, measured, and nuanced. And like all nuanced writers, his work can be easily partially quoted in such a way as to make him appear to deny or to support positions that he himself would not recognize.
By leaning into only his critiques of secular psychology, Powlison can be made to seem quite hostile to secular theories. After all, secular psychology is “a major enemy of the church” that is “a self-conscious, self-proclaimed competitor” to authentic faith practiced by “secular priest-pastors, shepherding the human soul… administering the institutions of the cure of souls, administering the mental health centers, the counseling offices, and the psychiatric hospitals.”[8] While such a quotation accurately captures Powlison’s words, it terribly misrepresents his actual belief system.
Likewise, it’s not difficult to make Powlison a proponent of what he would deny, as he affirms that “[t]he operations of God’s common grace can cause unbelievers to be relatively observant, caring, stimulating, and informative.”[9] Secular theories “embody helpful skills in knowing, in loving, and in speaking,” meaning that when wise biblical counselors “…encounter psychological information,” we should say, “I’m listening, so tell me anything and everything you know about everybody and anybody.”[10]Selectively quoting this side of Powlison’s thought makes him seem like an integrationist, seeing the therapies themselves as curing humanity’s greatest problems.
Conclusion
As with all nuanced thinkers, David Powlison’s literary legacy ought to be handled with care and integrity. He was deeply committed to the unique beauty of Scripture, the single greatest source for understanding the deepest crevices of human life in all its complexity. He also was unflaggingly positive that he could find aid outside the pages of Scripture in his quest to offer the clearest, wisest help possible to the people God placed within his care. Capturing Powlison’s vision is not always the easiest task, as careful nuance is never so simple as flat reductionism. However, David Powlison’s nuanced thought is a legacy of help to biblical counselors as we seek to grow and develop in our ability to love God and love our neighbors in a way befitting our great calling.
Questions for Reflection
- What do you most appreciate from the literary legacy of David Powlison?
- Where do you find yourself most challenged by his writings on Scripture and secular psychology?
[1] David Powlison, “Human Defensiveness: The Third Way,” The Journal of Pastoral Practice 8.1 (1988): 40-55.
[2] David Powlison, “The Right Kind of Weakness,” Journal of Biblical Counseling 33.2 (2019): 2-6.
[3] David Powlison, “Affirmations and Denials: A Proposed Definition of Biblical Counseling,” Journal of Biblical Counseling19.1 (2000): 18-25, 20.
[4] David Powlison, “Crucial Issues in Contemporary Biblical Counseling,” The Journal of Pastoral Practice 9.3 (1988): 53-78.
[5] Ibid.
[6] David Powlison, “How Does Scripture Teach Us to Redeem Psychology?” Journal of Biblical Counseling 26.3 (2012), 18-27, 19.
[7] Ibid.
[8] David Powlison, “Modern Therapies and the Church’s Faith,” Journal of Biblical Counseling 15.1 (1996): 32-41, 33.
[9] Powlison, “Affirmations and Denials,” 21.
[10] Powlison, “Redeem Psychology,” 19.
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