Are Biblical Counseling and Christian Psychology Logically Equivalent?
Continuing our mini series on Biblical Counseling, we’ve talked at length about what Biblical Counseling is and how it differs from Secular Psychology. Today I want to cover a branch of counseling that some have considered to be a ‘halfway point’ of sorts between Psychology and Biblical Counseling. This is what we may call ‘Christian Psychology’, ‘Christian Counseling’ or ‘Integrated counseling’. At face value it sounds great, right? This discipline wants to take the best that both the Psychological Realm and the Biblical realm has to offer and to integrate the two. Those who practice ‘Integrationism’ often see their field of practice as plundering the Egyptians as the Israelite nation did during the Exodus. They often say that they are taking the best that Psychology has to offer and mix it with the best that the Bible has to offer. I tend to believe that Christian Integrationism as a practice comes from a good heart, but tends overall to miss the depth of the riches and beauty of God’s Word. For example, to claim Psychology must be added to Scripture in order to bring healing to the individual is to imply that there are things to which Psychology speaks to better or more effectively than the Word of God.
This philosophy of counseling fully embraces the desire to distill the good insights out of the secular approach and, theoretically, to reject anything that is unbiblical in nature. However, it raises significant flaws in the design.
First, counseling originally belonged to the Church and was co-opted by the secularists (Freud, as we have already discussed). The good insights from counseling or psychology were originally taken from Biblical concepts and ‘converted’ to secularism. What I mean is that secularism took these principles and removed everything even remotely Christlike or God-honoring and slapped a label of ‘science’ on them.
Things like the nature of the soul, how man recognizes his purpose and what his relationship is to his own thoughts; but we see that these are all things originally and sufficiently addressed by Scripture. Sin became, over time, ‘unhelpful’ or ‘intrusive’ thoughts. Rather than objective rebellion against the King of the Universe, sin became something done against us by others rather than an inward disposition of wickedness. The basic tenants of counseling; Lordship, Love, Anthropology, Sin, and Hope all began as Biblical principles until Secular Psychology took over and reworked these insights to produce the Psychological framework of the modern day. The Christian does not need to receive anything from Psychology in order to redeem it. Integrationists see themselves as plundering the Egyptians, but I argue that a better image is of the intermarriage of the people of the lands upon Israel’s return to the Promised Land. In this event, though they were called time and time again to reject the teaching, worldview and gods of the nations surrounding them, the people of God added foreign wives and adulterous practices into the right worship of Yahweh. They didn’t take the best that the world had to offer, but altered their worship, conforming it to the image of secularism. We say around here that Jesus plus anything equals idolatry.
Rather than intermarrying, the Christian’s goal in counseling must be to reclaim that which was originally taken from them. Effectively what we have, then, is a counseling approach that declares Jesus plus the remnants of Biblical wisdom now called Psychology that we have wrestled away from the field equals a new way of approaching problems. But Christians do not require a new way of approaching the human condition because the work of Christ and the Word of God are fully sufficient to address the problems of sin that human beings experience. A result of combining secularism with Scripture is a widespread belief that the Word alone is no longer enough (sufficient) to speak to the questions and issues of everyday life, but that as mankind has grown and changed they require a new approach to their problems. This is the natural outgrowth that, having begun in the ‘Enlightenment’ is reaching full bloom in the modern era. Instead of declaring ‘Jesus plus secularism’ as the answer to our problems, we should declare that Scripture Alone is fully sufficient to speak to all matters of life and godliness. We should boldly proclaim that in Him ALL things hold together (Colossians 1:15-20). If Secular Psychology has plundered and distorted Scripture’s approach to counseling and Integrationism has attempted to plunder from Psychology instead of casting down the high places and returning fully to the Scriptural roots of both disciplines, what is the answer to the question of counseling philosophies? We’ve already discussed in a previous video that orthodox Christians believe that all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, correction, rebuke, encouragement, etc. If Scripture is indeed sufficient to provide all that God’s people require for life and godliness, then why do we need to plunder the Egyptians? The israelites were lacking resources and wealth and yet the Lord provided it for them. How much more has He provided the greatest resources and wealth through His infallible, inerrant, and sufficient Word?
