Heath Lambert: We are very excited that in just a matter of months, the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors is going to host our 41st Annual Conference in Jacksonville, Florida at the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, and we are going to be considering biblical counseling and the Protestant Reformation. Our goal at that conference is to look at the five Solas of the Reformation and see how they apply to biblical counseling.
One of the things that you may be wondering as you hear about that is why in the world would I want to go to a conference on the Protestant Reformation that has to do with counseling. After all, it is the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and so many people are doing conferences on that historic event in the Christian church. Why in the world would I want to go to a counseling conference on that? And what I say to people is that if you don’t understand why you should come to a counseling conference on the truths of the Reformation, then you really need to come to a counseling conference on the truths of the Reformation. Because if you don’t understand why that’s important then I would suggest that you don’t understand either the Protestant Reformation, or counseling ministry, or both. So, we really want to help the church get clarity on this and the question about why to do it just makes me more than excited that we actually are doing it. As a matter of fact, one of the key Solas of the Reformation that undergirded that great historic change in the life of the church, and is one of the elements that we’re going to consider at our Annual Conference, is the truth of Sola Scriptura, or Scripture Alone.
In the days of the Reformation, of course, the conflict between the reformers and the Roman Catholic Church had to do with what is the authority in the Christian Life. For the Roman Catholic Church, they believe that there were three sources of authority. There was the Scriptures, there was church tradition, and there was the Magisterium. The Magisterium being the teaching office of the church, composed of bishops and cardinals and presided over by the pope himself. So it was this sort of three-legged stool that upheld authority for the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant reformers came along and said, “no, that is not true. It is Scripture alone that is the authority for the Christian and for living the Christian life.” We can learn some things from church tradition. We can learn some things from teachers in the church but all of those things submit to the authority of the Bible which is the very Word of God.
The debate was not about whether it’s correct that there are other sources of information besides the Bible. Of course, there are other sources of information. The issue was what source has exclusive authority. For the reformers and for all of us who exist in the tradition of the Reformation, the exclusive source of authority for life and faith is the Bible. This has everything to do with counseling in general and with Biblical Counseling in particular. Because Biblical Counseling is the only approach to counseling that honors the Bible as the exclusive source of authority in counseling. Now, if that sounds controversial, I admit that it’s correct that it is controversial but it is also true.
The biblical counseling movement amongst all other approaches to counseling has been resolutely committed to the fact that the Bible must be the exclusive source of authority in counseling. When the biblical counseling movement has made this argument, we have been misunderstood. We’ve been misunderstood to say that the Bible is the only source of information. That charge is a misunderstanding and it’s not fair. In fact, I want to read to you from the standards of doctrine of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors and particularly Article 13, which talks about the doctrine of Common Grace. ACBC is very clear that “God extends his goodness to all people by making provision for their physical needs and granting them intellectual gifts. This goodness, also known as Common Grace, is what grants unbelievers the ability to apprehend facts in science, for example, and is why believers can affirm the true information that unbelievers come to understand.” The article goes on to explain some other realities about that truth. But right there at the very beginning of the article, you’ve got ACBC affirming that there is true information that exists in the scientific world for example. And that that true information comes from nothing less than the hand of God himself. So, as biblical counselors, we want to admit and agree that there is true information outside of the Bible and we want to give thanks for that information because we understand that it’s a good gift of God himself. So there’s simply no truth to the charge that biblical counselors think that something’s untrue if it comes from outside the Bible. In fact, our guiding documents at ACBC contradict that and I can tell you, I don’t know a single leader in the biblical counseling movement who believes that that charge is either fair or true. Biblical counselors believe that there are other sources of information that are perhaps even relevant to counseling, but they don’t believe that there’s any other source of information that is authoritative for counseling.
Now, let me give you an example of how this works out, because sometimes people who are kind of skeptical about that, they’ll say, “well, give me an example of some information that is true but that is outside the Bible that you would acknowledge.” If you’re sitting here listening to this and asking that question, let me refer you to last week’s podcast where we talked about whether or not Christians should smoke marijuana. If you go back and listen to that, you’ll hear me making use of extra-biblical information. I talked about one of the consequences of smoking marijuana being a loss of IQ, a loss of attention, and memory faculties. The reason I knew that information is because it actually write a journal article called “Persistent Cannabis Users Show Neuropsychological Decline From Childhood to Midlife”, an article that was published in proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I read that journal article with great interest and it gave me a lot of information that I did not know and that I could not find in the Scriptures. So I took that information and then what did I do? I compared it and placed it underneath the teaching of Scripture like in Ephesians 5:18, which says, “Do not be drunk with wine.” And so, I took this information and I brought it into submission of the authority of Scripture which says, in light of what I now understand to be the case with marijuana. I submit it to what I understand to be the case in God’s Word and we don’t get drunk with it, or we honor our body without using it. So this is an example of the way we can take extra-biblical information and bring it into submission to the Word of God. Now, if you don’t think that questions about marijuana use is relevant for counseling, then you need to counsel some more. We’re having to answer these kinds of questions all the time in counseling ministry. But let me give another example of where the authority of the Word of God is at stake in counseling and what this has to do with the biblical counseling movement and the Protestant Reformation.
Let’s talk about sharing the Gospel. Jesus Christ commands in some of His final words to his disciples that they should go into all the world and make disciples of all people, teaching them to observe all that He has commanded them. The Apostle Paul will say in his correspondence with the Corinthians that he determined to know nothing while he was with them but Christ and him crucified. You have a priority from the Son of God and one of His Apostles that there is an urgent requirement to share the Gospel with all men and with all women. The reality is that counseling approaches to the left of the biblical counseling movement like integration, Christian psychology, transformational psychology, and certainly just rank secular psychology—they do not share that commitment. The ethical standards from organizations affiliated with those other groups make it clear that it is not an urgent requirement to share the Gospel with lost people in counseling or to relate Jesus Christ to counseling. In fact, there are times when that might be unethical.
There’s a book called Christianity and Counseling that deals with five approaches to counseling. One approach is the biblical counseling approach. it’s actually authored by Dr. Stuart Scott who’s the Director of Membership at ACBC. Of the five approaches, all of them purportedly Christian, Dr. Scott’s approach—biblical counseling—is the only one that insists that Christ must be discussed in counseling with somebody like a struggling person that they deal with in the book. The other approaches to one degree or another explicitly reject that. Now, here’s what’s happening here. You’ve got secular standards of counseling ethics on the one hand that say it’s inappropriate to proselytize or evangelize. And you have Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul on the other hand saying we must speak of Jesus Christ. When a Christian decides that they will not obey Jesus and the Apostle Paul, but they will obey secular standards of counseling ethics, they have placed those secular psychological standards of therapy above the standard of the Word of God. It’s not only a violation of Sola Scriptura as it flows out of the Reformation, it is a violation of the Word of God itself, which commands these things. What that means is that this is an urgent matter. The glory of Christ in the authority of the Word is on the line in whether or not we really, really believe in the Reformation truth of Sola Scriptura, and that’s just two issues. One having to do with marijuana, one having to do with nothing less than the Gospel of Jesus Christ self.
