Dale Johnson: Today on the podcast I have with me Dr. Ernie Baker. He’s a fellow with ACBC and the senior adult pastor at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida. He also serves as director of training with Overseas Instruction in Counseling, and he’s the chairman of the undergraduate degree program in biblical counseling at the Master’s University. He’s married to Rose, and they have six children. Five of which are married, and they have 14 grandchildren. He’s the author of a number of books and articles, including being the editor of the new critical issues in biblical counseling series by Shepherd Press, which is exactly what we’re going to talk about today. Ernie, I’m so grateful for you, brother, and I’m looking forward to the rest of this series coming out and looking forward to our conversation today. Welcome to the podcast.
Ernie Baker: Thank you Dale. I always appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, really looking forward to our discussion today. I’ve been excited about the two books that have come out so far in this series and you’ve worked tirelessly on these things. You have written one, and Heath has written another, and there are a few more to come out that I’m excited about. Talk just for a second about the motivation of these books and the particular need to have a discussion that these books will address.
Ernie Baker: Well, we all know that there are discussions going on in the broader Biblical Counseling World about what we believe and we have been concerned for a while about how to address these in ways that especially people in ACBC training can understand and we’ll talk more about the target audience, but I was really motivated to help people in our Phase 2 training understand the issues and be discerning and then we all know that the mental health world in the United States is in question —there’s a lot of questions being raised and so we wanted to help people understand what are the issues and I think another thing I would add is people are on the line. It’s all about people; everybody wants to help others. So, the two great commandments: how do we love God, and how do we love others? It’s really a deep motivation of my soul to glorify the Lord.
So, I hope and pray that the whole series glorifies The Lord. It would be hard to explain to you how many times I’ve committed the series to the Lord and said, Lord, I hope your name is glorified through this series. We really want to help people because precious people are on the line here and there’s so many different theories right now about how to help people.
Dale Johnson: You know, well said, there are definitely critical issues that are abundant right now causing all sorts of splintering and division in some ways. What I pray for is clarity in these days, certainly room to disagree but making sure that those disagreements are clear and where those points of tension are and then how we think differently about those and to have these discussions in a way that are very helpful. That’s always important.
I teach my students this whether at the master’s level or doctoral level. It’s always important when you read books to understand the context in which they come in because there’s typically discussion that’s happening that’s been a burden of the author in some way that can bring in their perspective into what’s going on in the culture at large and it’s important not only to understand that context but also the audience that the author is writing to because that would change the way in which you know, the author is trying to communicate and not to misread the authors as if they’re trying to communicate to a different audience. So, talk a little bit about the target audience of this particular series where you’re addressing critical issues.
Ernie Baker: I already mentioned that I was thinking about the ACBC Phase 2 exam person in particular. So, what I’ve been telling the other authors is think of a serious lay reader and someone who’s not afraid to think a little more deeply, but we don’t want it to be so academic that it’s overwhelming. So, what we’re trying to do, and we don’t want them to be so thick that someone looks at the book and says, “I can’t ever get through that book”. So, we’re aiming in the 14,000- and 18,000-word range, which is like a chapter and a half of an academic book. We are thinking of a serious lay reader but we’re putting extensive footnotes in case somebody wants to do more research on their own.
So, we want them to be highly documented. They could even be used for training and our training centers or I’m hoping students in Bible colleges and seminaries will use them to just help sharpen their thinking on these issues and the first two topics were chosen because they are foundational types of issues and questions that are going on in the broader Biblical Counseling World. I’ve had people in our church read them and I even had a professor at Masters University read my book on the psychologies and say, “I did not understand that the psychologies were so philosophical.” I thought that was fascinating and I was very thankful. He thanked me for the book, and he said I’ll think differently about the psychology’s now.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, that’s really helpful. I think there are some topics that certainly need to be addressed and covered and, as I tell my students when they walk in the door on the first day, “The goal of this class is not that I replicate myself; the goal of this class is that I want to present what’s at stake and asking the right questions appropriately so that you can do what you’re doing on purpose, land where you land on purpose in a certain direction” and you’ve chosen in this series to address some of those critical issues and to make argumentation in one direction reasonably, right and I think that’s helpful.
I want you to talk for just a second on particular titles that are out now. There are two titles that have been released and some others that are coming. Why did you choose these? Because when you’re setting this up as an editor you sort of choose, okay, I want to address some of these topics in a particular order if at all possible. Why did you choose the two topics that have been released upfront in this series?
Ernie Baker: Well, mine is Biblical Counseling and the Psychologies [1]. So, the titles will always be Biblical Counseling and so… and then Heath’s is Biblical Counseling and Common Grace [2]. Then the next one coming out is Biblical Counseling and Mental Health Diagnosis, and I’ll talk more about that in a little bit. But, Biblical Counseling and the Psychologies, I think is just foundational and it’s based upon a way of thinking that I was taught by David Powlison, and I just consider it in the kind providence of God that He allowed me to study under David Powlison and to have many conversations with him about issues.
Quite frankly, I’ve been surprised that this system of thinking has not gotten more traction. I haven’t seen it written about anywhere other than where I’ve been writing about it in books. I did not see articles where this system of thinking was used, and it was extremely helpful for me to analyze counseling systems using what he (Powlison) taught us as six criteria and then I added a seventh criteria thanks to my friend Jenn Chen. She found it very helpful when I went through these in my Theology of Counseling class at Masters University; it really helped her say yeah, that is exactly true. And I’ve had conversations with psychologists out in the secular world and use these seven areas to discern their counseling system and it was just extremely helpful and they admitted yes, that’s a good way to think about counseling systems.
So, my burden is to help people be discerning and I can either do fishing for people and continue to evaluate every counseling system for people or I can teach them how to fish and, in my book, I’m trying to teach them how to fish so that we can grow in discernment of there’s always a new fad, there is always a new system, always new therapies. And how do you think about these through biblical lenses? So, I guess the one statement I would make about the context, immediate context, is in biblical counseling with my heritage with Jay Adams and then David Powlison; I’ve been taught to think about how do we interact with the psychologies. Still, now in the Biblical Counseling World, it seems that there are people moving toward the psychologies when people in the psychology and the mental health world are even questioning their system, their own system. So, I want people to be confident in the word of God as a way to discern belief systems.
Heath’s book is obvious if anybody’s been following the issues. The issue of common Grace is extremely significant, and the pivot point there to get a little technical, the view of Herman Bavinck versus Cornelius Van Til and people are using a broader, I would think of a broader reformed epistemology to try to understand people and problems. And because of Bavinck’s view of common grace, it allows for a broader view of what methodologies you can use. Well, there was a reason why what I would call in my book historic presuppositional biblical counseling, there’s a reason why Jay Adams and David Powlison they were taught by Van Til of VanTIlliean thinking. So they had a narrower view of common grace. I just wanted people to realize that in my book and Heath in his book is saying your view of common grace does not need to denigrate in any way the view of the sufficiency of Scripture. While we can honor and uphold the beauty of the doctrine of common grace, we still need to understand what the Scripture says about itself, that it is sufficient. And so, he’s arguing for the sufficiency of Scripture while still being thankful for the discoveries of science, etc, and he uses a case study to do so to help people understand and I also in my book I use a case study to help people understand. So those are the first two and I think of them as foundational, they seem to be cutting edge issues in my mind of what’s going on in the culture and the Biblical Counseling World. So, I wanted those two books to be foundational.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, and I would agree. I think your approach to how you see these things in the framework that you use is critical as we think biblically about the psychologies and the philosophies that come or that build the certain psychologies and then certainly common grace and how we think either expansively or a little bit more limited in how we understand our view of common grace and Heath’s certainly addresses that head-on as you do the psychologies in those two books. I’ve read both of those, I would certainly recommend both of those, and those are the two series two books in the series that are out already. Now we’ve talked about this as being a broader series, and there are some more titles to come. You mentioned one of those in regard to mental health, which I think is a hot topic as you mentioned. The ideas of mental health are not monolithic if I could just explain this very quickly. You have psychologists who think one thing then you’ve got a psychiatrist who think another thing and they’re sort of at war right now in one being biased toward therapy and really bringing out to the forefront really the devastation that modern medicine has done in the world of Psychiatry that it’s not been as helpful as what many people thought back in the 90s and early 2000s. Whereas on the other side with Psychiatry they’re still hoping that we’re going to find something that can be, you know, helpfully explained in the brain and finding neurological discoveries and so on. So, you got these guys warring back and forth and none of them are without their own biases, but it’s not a monolithic narrative where it’s like, oh man, they have their science so together and we need to figure it out. It’s actually a discipline where you’re seeing high-level psychiatrists saying, you know, we need to know where to go next, we don’t know what’s next. We’re going to start talking about different evidence-based instead of criteria-based perspectives on how we go.
I just read an article this past week that was really interesting about what’s happening in Parliament in the UK where they have this program they’re calling it “Beyond Pills,” and the basic idea is they’re questioning the whole pursuit of mental health as it currently stands in the NHS, which is really interesting when you understand the narrative that’s happening more broadly and it is quite fascinating to watch this happen. And now you’ve got a government that’s even getting involved saying listen, we got to pump the brakes here, people are not getting better, they’re getting worse. We’re overprescribing, we’re overprescribing to the point to where it’s not being something that actually alleviates the problem that we’re trying to fix it’s actually contributing to it in a very unhealthy way, and it’s a really interesting narrative that’s developing. So, if you’re following some of that literature, it’s quite interesting, which I think is why the timing of some of these critical issues is important right now.
I want to give you an opportunity maybe this is the last thing we’ll talk about today but giving you an opportunity to talk about some of the upcoming titles. I’m excited to see some of the new titles that you guys are working on to address some of the critical issues. I mentioned the one on mental health you can elaborate on that and then some of the other ones that you see coming forward in the days to come.
Ernie Baker: Dr. Jenn Chen, who is more than qualified to talk about the mental health world, is an ACBC certified counselor. She loves the sufficiency of Scripture, and she spent over two decades working in the LA mental health system as a clinical psychologist. She has a neuroscience background. She entered into the mental health world under the DSM-3 and she left under DSM-5. She is writing to help people understand what is being said at the academic level about the DSM. They actually would like to do away with it and it seems so ironic to me that some people in the Biblical Counseling World want to move toward the DSM while people in the secular academic realm want to move away from the DSM and Jenn is trying to give readers an academic perspective on what the DSM is, what it can do and can’t do. What areas might be accurate in the DSM —so, she’s really honest about that of where there might be evidence biologically, which is very few of the hundreds of categories in the DSM, and then at the end she gives people confidence in the Word of God that you don’t need the DSM to be an effective biblical counselor. I really think that biblical counselors need that shot in the arm right now because there’s so much mental illness and mental health talk in our culture and I’m even running into it internationally. The Philippines is starting to be saturated with mental health talk. I was in Brazil; they are being saturated with mental health talk. I taught in East Africa recently and they’re being saturated with mental health talk and the timing of the book really couldn’t be better. I wish it was out two weeks ago, but it’s coming very soon. So that’s Biblical Counseling and Mental Health Diagnosis. It’ll be available in the fall of ’24.
Then we have Biblical Counseling and the Body coming out by a physician who is ACBC certified. We have Biblical Counseling and the Brain that we’re starting to work on. I’m not a neuroscientist in any way, even though I’m fascinated by the subject, but my friend Eric Everhart, a neuropsychologist at East Carolina University, will write the neuroscience part of what is true and what is false. How do you tell pseudoscience and he’s really concerned about all the claims being made like things like amygdala hijacking and Broca’s area of the brain being shut down and he was in May of 2023 when I was on with you, he came on and talked. So we’re co-authoring that book Biblical Counseling and the Brain. He’s going to do the brain part. I’m going to do the theology part of the book. And then I just started talking to our brother Lance Quinn, and he’s going to do one on Biblical Counseling and Foundations and talk about and try to explain Van Til in a way that’s understandable and how Van Til influenced Jay Adams and David Powlison. So those are the ones that are in the works right now or will be written very soon.
Dale Johnson: Well, it’s great and I’m looking forward to Dr. Everhart being with us at the ACBC colloquium this summer presenting on some of the ideas that you’re describing here. Looking forward to that challenge from someone who works in the field every day as a professor, but also in research with these doctoral students. It was a delight to have him on the podcast in the past and I’m looking forward to our discussion that’s going to happen at colloquium coming up this summer already. This has been really helpful. These are certainly days where we have to address some of the critical issues, and we want to do that in a way that’s gracious and biblically grounded, certainly being aware of the research that’s happening more broadly. But looking at it through a distinct lens that corrects us all which is the Scripture, and it helps us to see who we really are from God’s perspective which is what matters and so I’m grateful for the burden the Lord has given you to help produce some of these things and to organize this. I am grateful to Shepherds Press for their involvement as well in producing these works here. Ernie, thank you again for your time, and I appreciate the time today as well.
Ernie Baker: Thanks, brother.
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