Our culture seems to be screaming with thousands of voices that we each have the right to live like we want, how we want, doing whatever we want. Anarchy is not a way to live life, but if we all live out ‘I did it my way’, we will have no rules to protect ourselves from ourselves. When Jesus was deep in agony before the crucifix toon, He surrendered His anxiety to the Father by saying ‘Not my way, but Your way’. We each have the same struggle in many of our decisions as we work out what God’s purpose is in our lives. Like Nicky states, Moses is a great example of feeling inadequate and flaws, but God provided what he needed to follow through on God’s plan. What an encouragement to us.
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
Bible 39
As science discovers more connections in the universe and with medicine,, it seems that the conclusion of research is verifying what the Bible has said all along. The universe from the farthest reaches of space all the way to the living breathing humans have a Creator who thoughtfully put everything together by design. To deny this conclusion would seem rather foolish, considering the evidence. Since the evidence is clear, we ought to consider what the Creator has said to us in verbal written words. I’ve spent a lot of thinking time doubting God’s sovereignty and dismissing Him as an added belief to what I’ve thought important. But I now realize He needs to be the central point of living my life, not just a good thing to do. I should not worry about what others think of me, nor be concerned if my faith seems radical. Our eternal destiny rests on Him.
Renovation 2
Our culture seems to be hardening the heart to be compassionate let alone receptive to God’s invitation to surrender to Him. The heart is the center of our moral choices and intentions. How we live out our goals, demonstrate our actions and beliefs, and the way we treat others originate from our heart. One Christian psychologist (Dr. Caroline Leaf) explains that our heart informs our mind, emotions, and life outcomes. We won’t see lasting change or progress without addressing issues of our heart.
“The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layers of their soul.” - Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ
David Powlison
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.
About the Author
Nate Brooks
Nate Brooks serves as an Associate Professor of Counseling at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC. He is also the director of Courage Christian Counseling, a practice that specializes in trauma, abuse, grief, and loss. Nate is married to Kate, a counselor specializing in chronic pain, and they have three kids who specialize in being kids. When he’s not counseling, Nate can usually be found trail running or reading old Dutch theologians and classic literature.
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Bible 38
I used to think that as long as I believed the right stuff, I was a ‘good enough’ Christian. But I’m learning and relearning the importance of acknowledging the fact I don’t know everything and cannot fix everything. I’m deeply flawed and need a Savior everyday of my life. If I don’t practice what I know to be true, I lose ground to the cultural drift. One verse that comes to mind is Romans 12;2 - be transformed, not conformed to culture. If I don’t practice kindness, generosity, loyalty, and faithfulness, these qualities fade to the background.
Renovation 1
How have we been discipled by tradition and culture so much that we become blind to the truth of Scripture? I used to think that as long as I had my ticket for Heaven, I didn’t need to be concerned about a lot of issues in my life. As long as I believed the right stuff, I was good enough. But I’ve been learning and relearning that following Jesus involves every decision I make. Being transformed is a life long process of change, not being conformed to fit into cultural expectations. It involves how I talk to myself and how I relate to others. I’m learning over and over how flawed I am and how I need a Savior every song day of my life.
“We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.” - Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ
Monday, February 5, 2024
Illuminator
Finishing the task is an enormous task but God is gathering resources illumiNations
100 percent of the world’s population, a New Testament for 99.9 percent, and a full Bible for 95 percent by 2033. That is 9 years away. Is His return imminent?
I do not want to be discouraged by the anger and division in the news but fixed on what God is doing.
Michael Sprague
THANK YOU
I have always been tickled by rehearing the account about the agnostic University Professor visiting the Fiji Islands and observing how influential the missionaries had been over the years. The Professor said to the tribal chief, “I see schools and churches everywhere. It is a shame you have been duped by the missionaries. No one believes the Bible anymore. The story of Jesus dying on the cross for sin is worn out and thread bare.”
The Tribal Chief responded, “Do you see that rock over there? On that rock we smashed the heads of our victims before we ate them. Do you see that oven over there? That is where we roasted our victims before we ate them. Mr. Professor were it not for those missionaries who brought us the cross of Jesus Christ and the love of God that changed us from cannibals into followers of Jesus, you would have been our supper by now!“
“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).
Can you say thank you for the cross? Go ahead and say it out loud ... God, thank you for the cross. The cross is not the end of the story, but it is the centerpiece of our story. Amen?
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