Part 1 – What Are We Doing Here? How the “Worldview” of Biblical Counseling Differs from Secular Therapies
ARTICLE • The worldview of biblical counselors differs significantly from both secular and secularized ‘Christian’ worldviews, influencing the aims that the counseling conversation should take, the diagnoses of the root causes of a counselee’s troubles and responses to trouble, and the actual counsel given.
Read time: 7 min
Counselors are not fully objective voices speaking into a counselee’s experience. We all unavoidably hear and interpret data and speak out of our own worldview assumptions and presuppositions. Worldview shapes the questions asked during counseling and the recommendations made. In this respect, a thoroughly biblical worldview differs significantly from both secular and secularized ‘Christian’ worldviews, influencing the aims that the counseling conversation should take, the diagnoses of the root causes of a counselee’s troubles and responses to trouble, and the actual counsel given.
The Impact of Worldview on Hearing, Interpreting, and Understanding the Counseling Conversation
Just as counselees interpret life experiences though a worldview grid, so do counselors. A worldview may be described as “a conceptual scheme by which we consciously or unconsciously place or fit everything we believe and by which we interpret and judge reality.”[1] As such, one’s counseling worldview is inevitably theological.[2] God defines humanity, diagnoses troubles in living, prescribes faith in Christ as the solution, and details a transformative process in Scripture. Nothing is more relevant to counseling than interpreting life as God sees it.
Every worldview contains not only formal theologies but—more impactfully—informal yet functional theologies.[3] Functional theologies always take the upper hand until Scripture is brought to bear upon the subtle ways our intuitive beliefs, values, and choices contradict God’s word. Zack Eswine notes, “Regardless of what we profess about our theology with a ‘Big T,’ all our little theologies show up at the most unexpected times” in the midst of the pressures of life.[4] For this reason, a counselor’s formal and informal theological convictions about a counselee will shape how they hear and interpretation the data. Assumptions about such fundamental matters as counselees being moral agents, the personal, relational, and noetic effects of the Fall, and God’s redemptive solutions for personal change through Christ, the Spirit, the Word, and Christian community necessarily shape how the counseling conversation unfolds. Carl Jung’s admission perhaps said it best: “We psychotherapists must occupy ourselves with problems which, strictly speaking, belong to the theologian.” [5] For this reason, David Powlison critiqued the view that “the old truths of Christianity no longer do the job,” which invariably leaves in its wake a “Godless, Christless, Spiritless, and Wordless” form of counseling.[6]
The Biblical Corrective
How does the biblical worldview correct such grievous departures from how God sees the world? Powlison advocated that if Scripture is authoritative, then it must be what defines the aims and processes of the counseling conversation itself, and Scripture is not silent:
Given the culture’s professionalized definition [of counseling], the Bible seems relatively insufficient—even utterly silent—on the subject of counseling. But if counseling is about the tongue, and wise or foolish companions, and master-disciple relationships, and one-anothering influences for good or bad, and the truth or lie that speaks in the heart, and ministry of the Word of life... then the Bible brims.[7]
Based on the counselor’s worldview, the counseling task will be either reorienting the counselee away from God and towards self-trust, or towards God, the authoritative source of all truth and redemptive change. Powlison helpfully described three distorting effects of not viewing a counselee and counseling through the biblical lens. The “magnifying effect,” the “blinkering effect,” and the “pervasive distorting effect” occurs when a secularized counselor (1) astigmatically describes life problems with microscopic detail while missing the big picture, (2) selectively focuses on specific aspects while ignoring contradicting evidence that challenge a singular narrative of cause and effect, or (3) fundamentally distorts observations and interpretations that lead to biased solutions tailored to the theorist’s predefined explanations.[8] In summary, counseling driven by the Bible seeks above all else to see as God sees, to please the Lord, and to guide counselees to bear true spiritual fruit of sanctification (Eph 4:11–32).
Asking Questions, Listening, and Responding: Biblical Versus Other Worldviews
The biblical worldview of counseling differs in at least three ways from other worldviews.
First, it operates via a different final and functional authority.
In counseling, who or what is the final authority? What is measure or standard of truth and therapeutic success? Shall a counselee’s subjective feelings lead the way, or empirical research, or pragmaticism? Because the God of the Bible is the final and functional authority, biblical counselors operate accordingly. While secularists deny the authority of Scripture altogether, Christian integrationists hold that Scripture is finally authoritative but functionally insufficient to provide all we need for the cure of souls. Powlison drilled down to the heart of the issue: “Is the engine of counseling theory and practice external or internal to the Faith?”[9] The apostle Peter answered the question by asserting, “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence” (2 Pet 1:3).
Second, the biblical worldview offers a different diagnosis of the root of human problems.
In short, “Our core psychological problem is sin, and the core resolution is awakening faith.”[10] By way of contrast, in secular and even secularized ‘Christian’ counseling, any number of contrived diagnoses are alleged—societal influence, biological disposition, attachment disorder, trauma, maladjustment, etc. Susie Orbach interprets Natalie’s affair and lying to her husband as “Natalie’s difficulty with holding together different parts of herself. . .. Her affair might be a way for her to be in touch with the part of her that has been sequestered.”[11] Paul Wachtel sees the problem as behavioral cycles of vice and virtue. He states, “The theory that guides my work . . . [looks for the phenomenon of] cycles of reciprocal causation between intrapsychic processes and the events of daily living . . .,” a cocktail of “behavioral, experiential, and family systems traditions.”[12] Whereas Wachtel’s model may interpret low self-esteem, for instance, as resulting from the interplay between behavioral patterns, experiences, and childhood upbringing, the biblical worldview may diagnose the root cause as “a failed idol” and call for heart-level repentance and not mere behavioral rehabilitation.[13] Powlison compellingly describes the workings and effects of sin:
Sin is a darkened mind, drunkenness, animal-like instinct and compulsion, madness, slavery, ignorance, stupor. . .. The unconscious and semiconscious nature of much sin simply testifies to the fact that we are steeped in it. Sinners think, want, and act sin-like by nature, nurture, and practice. We instinctively return evil for evil. All psychological processes are sin kinked. That is the most interesting and significant thing about them diagnostically.[14]
Therefore, the biblical counselor asks, listens, and interprets with the understanding that the counselee’s issues are not merely psychological or relational but fundamentally spiritual. As Richard Sibbes indicated, “The whole soul is out of joint till it be set right again by him whose office is to ‘restore all things.’”[15]
Third, the biblical worldview differs from other worldviews in its understanding of the cure.
Susie Orbach counsels as if the therapeutic relationship and the conversation itself is a major part of the cure: “Therapy is as much a listening cure as it is a talking cure.”[16] Wachtel advocates a psychotherapeutic behaviorism that aims to design virtue cycles that overcome vice cycles.[17] In all, even ‘empirically-based’ therapies offer divergent and often contradictory approaches—from “suggestion via the imagination, to patient subordination, to psychodynamic transference or creative expression, through to the aversive conditioning of behaviour.”[18] In contrast, biblical counseling seeks to help blind eyes see life through the lens of the gospel.
Believers are chosen by God, forgiven, and adopted, being shaped into Christ’s likeness, and are reliant on God’s provision rather than independent strength. Hope lies in God’s power at work within us and the promise of sanctification and a renewed creation through Christ Jesus.[19] ❖
References:
[1] Ronald H. Nash, Worldviews in Conflict: Choosing Christianity in a World of Ideas (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 16, cited in Heath Lambert, A Theology of Biblical Counseling: The Doctrinal Foundations of Counseling Ministry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2016), 16.
[2] Lambert, A Theology of Biblical Counseling, 16.
[3] Paul Tripp, “Strategies for Opening Blind Eyes: Data Gathering, Part 3,” The Journal of Biblical Counseling 15, no. 1 (1996): 47, https://store.ccef.org/my-account/jbc/1501/strategies-for-opening-blind-eyes-data-gathering-part-3.
[4] Zack W. Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015), 47, Kindle.
[5] Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1933), 241, cited in David Powlison, “Modern Therapies and the Church’s Faith,” The Journal of Biblical Counseling 15, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 33, https://www.ccef.org/jbc-article/modern-therapies-and-the-churchs-faith.
[6] Powlison, “Modern Therapies and the Church’s Faith,” 33.
[7] David Powlison, “Cure of Souls (and the Modern Psychotherapies),” The Journal of Biblical Counseling 25, no. 2 (2007): 14, https://store.ccef.org/my-account/jbc/2502/cure-of-souls-and-the-modern-psychotherapies.
[8] Powlison, “Modern Therapies and the Church’s Faith,” 38–39.
[9] Powlison, “Cure of Souls (and the Modern Psychotherapies),” 11.
[10] Powlison, “Cure of Souls (and the Modern Psychotherapies),” 25.
[11] Susie Orbach, In Therapy: The Unfolding Story (London: Profile Books, 2018), 225, Kindle.
[12] Paul L. Wachtel, Therapeutic Communication: Knowing What to Say When, 2nd ed. (London: Guilford Publications, 2011), 67–68, Kindle.
[13] David Powlison, “Cure of Souls (and the Modern Psychotherapies),” The Journal of Biblical Counseling 25, no. 2 (2007): 40, https://store.ccef.org/my-account/jbc/2502/cure-of-souls-and-the-modern-psychotherapies.
[14] Powlison, “Cure of Souls (and the Modern Psychotherapies),” 26.
[15] Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2010), 86, Kindle.
[16] Orbach, In Therapy, 272–273.
[17] Wachtel, Therapeutic Communication, 83.
[18] Sarah Marks, “Psychotherapy in Historical Perspective,” History of the Human Sciences 30, no. 3 (2017): 12, https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695117703243.
[19]Edward T. Welch, “Counseling Those Who Are Depressed,” The Journal of Biblical Counseling 20, no. 2 (2000): 12–13, https://store.ccef.org/my-account/jbc/1802/counseling-those-who-are-depressed.
