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Ep. 36 Why I Don’t Align With Nouthetic Or Biblical Counseling

Ep. 36 Why I Don't Align With Nouthetic Or Biblical Counseling

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Shows Main Idea – Counseling movements are relatively new to Christianity. They were introduced to the church in 1969, and though they have served us well, it’s time to restore historical soul care to its former position in the church. The historical model and practice are called discipleship, a model that genuinely enlists every person in the body of Christ and is practiced at any time and in any place.

Show Notes

Soul Care Models01

Three Counseling Camps

  1. Nouthetic counseling
  2. Biblical counseling
  3. Christian counseling

One of the ironies of this “third camp” is that some biblical counselors call “Christian counseling” un-Christian because there are some Christians who use un- or sub-biblical practices in their counseling. Thus, the biblical counselor refuses to call themselves a Christian counselor.

Think about that for a moment: Christian means Christ-follower, and the biblical counselor does not want to be considered a Christ-follower counselor. Granted, some people make a mess of the word Christian but should we abandon the word because of unbiblical practices?

I’m not ready to abandon, separate, or disassociate myself from being labeled a Christ-follower yet. Sadly, I have made a mockery of Christianity at times in my walk with the LORD. Even so, I love the name Christian and gladly wear the appellation.

Ten Unintended Consequences of Counseling Movements

  1. Counselors spend a lot of time defending or advocating their positions.
  2. Counselors divide themselves into unnecessary camps.
  3. Counselors create a two-tier system within Christianity: those who can v. those who can’t counsel.
  4. Counselors live in a small world that does not target the larger world of Christianity well.
  5. Counseling is self-limiting because it only works when God grants repentance (2 Timothy 2:24-25).
  6. Counseling is a short relational season that rarely creates long-term relationships.
  7. Counseling is an artificial environment, which makes bringing hard truth a challenge.
  8. Counseling relationships are detached. Thus they do not have a clear picture of a person’s life.
  9. Counseling does not correctly exalt historical discipleship. Counselors promote counseling.
  10. The victim wife does not care about movements or camps. She wants help. People are pragmatic when it comes to their problems. The church is God’s ordained context, outside the home, to bring comprehensive soul care to the wife, husband, and children, while enlisting the community to help them. No counselor can accomplish this broad, sweeping, and competent care.

Discipleship Practices

  1. Sufficiency of Scripture
  2. Spirit-led (pneumatic)
  3. Formal, directive
  4. Informal, relational
  5. Compassionate
  6. Confrontational
  7. Addresses suffering
  8. Addresses sin
  9. Problem-centered
  10. Person-centered
  11. Heart motives
  12. Behavioral change
  13. Passive obedience
  14. Active obedience
  15. Calls a person to repentance
  16. Waits for God to grant repentance
  17. Uses unique gifting
  18. Full body participation
  19. Builds unity
  20. Equips the body of Christ

Discipleship can be biblically defended (apologetic). It is God’s way: “Go and make disciples.”

Jesus walked, sat, ate, slept, and lived with sinners. He entered into their real world, related to them in practical ways, and brought careful soul care to them. He did not hang out a shingle, creating an alternate environment for people to come to Him for care.

The primary context for this kind of relational culture is in the local church where everyone participates according to how the LORD has distributed His gifts to them. The principal and best way of describing His approach to soul care is discipleship.

From Heath Lambert

Explaining the difference between nouthetic and biblical counseling is a bit like asking whether a coin is heads or tails. A coin is both heads and tails. In talking about the heads side or the tails side of the coin, we are merely emphasizing different surfaces of one thing.

Such is the case with today’s conservative, Bible-based counseling movement. The language of “nouthetic” or “biblical” serves to emphasize different streams inside one, larger movement. First, I will explain why nouthetic and biblical counseling are two sides of the same coin, and then I will explain the differences that each side emphasizes.

One Coin

Whether you use the term “nouthetic” or “biblical” counseling, Jay Adams was the man who got the whole project started with his first book on counseling, Competent to Counsel: Introduction to Nouthetic Counseling. The word nouthetic in the title comes from a Greek word meaning to confront or admonish. When Adams applied this language to counseling he argued that it included three elements:

  1. confrontation happening in a face-to-face manner;
  2. confrontation done out of loving concern for the counselee; and
  3. confrontation done with the purpose of bringing about change that God desires.

In that book, which introduced evangelicalism to his nouthetic model, the very first time he refers to his project in the early pages, he calls it “biblical counseling.” That was more than 40 years ago, but even today on his own website at the Institute for Nouthetic Studies, Adams says that nouthetic counseling “is biblical counseling.”

In a 1976 book, What About Nouthetic Counseling, Adams said he actually preferred the title “biblical counseling.” He has continued to use the “nouthetic” label to keep his project separate from approaches to counseling that are unfaithful to the Scriptures but increasingly apply the “biblical counseling” label to their work. For Adams, there is nothing sacred about a label. What matters is whether the Bible drives understanding of people as well as the counseling task.

The next big leader in Adams’s counseling movement was David Powlison, who succeeded Adams as the editor of The Journal of Pastoral Practice and immediately renamed it The Journal of Biblical Counseling (a decision Adams himself approved). Powlison is more responsible than anyone else for bringing biblical counseling into the mainstream of evangelicalism.

Even Powlison, however, has not been hung up on a “biblical” counseling label, but has at times referred to the movement as biblical-nouthetic counseling and serves on the board of the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors (NANC). For Powlison, like Adams, the defining mark of faithfulness in counseling is whether it conforms to the Scriptures, not what one calls it.

Beyond these two giants in the field, examples could be multiplied. Ed Welch, another key leader, has in the past referred to the movement as biblical-nouthetic counseling. NANC, perhaps the largest organization in the movement, defines their purpose as pursuing excellence in biblical counseling.

There are no massive fault lines in the movement between “biblical” and “nouthetic” labels. Regardless of the name a person uses, the people in the movement are committed to using the Scriptures as the source of wisdom that drives the change process in conversational ministry.

You can read the entire article here.

Heath Lambert is assistant professor of biblical counseling at Boyce College and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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