A Word from Bob
For a much longer post on Powlison’s views, see, David Powlison on Common Grace, Biblical Counseling, and Secular Psychology.
The Bible and Extra-Biblical Sources
In 2007, David Powlison wrote one of his most influential articles: “Cure of Souls (and the Modern Psychotherapies).” This is a detailed, thirty-five page article that could easily be a booklet if not a small book. In this article, as the title suggests, Powlison specifically addresses how biblical counselors view, use, and engage with secular psychology theory and practice. Powlison also contrasts how Christian integrative counselors and biblical counselors see the relationship of the Bible to extra-biblical resources.
It is in this article that Powlison introduces his acronyms “COMPIN” and “VITEX.” COMPIN is Powlison’s summary of the biblical counseling position on secular psychology which states that,
“The Christian faith contains COMPrehensive INternal resources to enable us to construct a Christian model of personality, change, and counseling” (11).
The other model—the Christian integrative counseling model—is “VITEX,” which:
“Believes that secular psychologies must make a VITal EXternal contribution in the construction of a Christian model of personality, change, and counseling” (11).
In an article about how Christianity provides comprehensive resources for building a biblical counseling model of people, problems, and solutions, it may be surprising to read how Powlison describes the biblical counselor’s view and use of extra-biblical information. One might assume that since biblical counselors do not believe secular psychology makes a vital contribution to building a counseling model, that therefore secular psychology makes little contribution. However, this is not Powlison’s position at all.
Can a Biblical Counselor Be Sufficiency-Centered and Psychology-Informed?
Put in the language of 2024, Powlison is saying that biblical counselors are sufficiency-centered and psychology-informed. That is quite the claim. Let’s see how Powlison develops his theology of the Christian use of non-Christian resources.
Insisting that biblical counselors “believe that the Bible fiercely resists syncretism” (8), Powlison adds:
“But they [biblical counselors] still claim that something can be learned from the psychologies: wrong does not mean stupid; error must borrow elements of truth to be plausible; God often allows observant and persuasive error to expose lacunae, crudities, and distortions in His own children’s thinking and practice. That Scripture is ‘sufficient’ to transform us never means that the Bible is ‘exhaustive’” (8).
So, what should biblical counselors do with such secular information? Study it!
“There is solid theological rationale for viewing secular disciplines as fit subjects for hard study. The stuff of psychology does not necessarily wholly overlap the Bible” (9).
Powlison, as always, is careful and nuanced. Biblical counselors do not build their model on secular psychology, however, they are secular psychology-informed:
“While the modern psychologies will stimulate and inform, they do not play a constitutive role in building a robust model” (11).
“But as honest observers and thinkers, COMPIN advocates want to gain what knowledge they can, both theoretical and applied, from the social sciences and other fields” (13).
“Theoretical and applied”—that is, theology and methodology. Powlison asserts that biblical counselors want to gain knowledge about the theory and methods of counseling from the social sciences—from modern psychotherapies.
Speaking of COMPIN biblical counselors and of VITEX Christian integrative counselors, Powlison explains,
“Both sides say we can learn something from psychology; both sides say the Bible gets final say” (13).
In Powlison’s eyes, biblical counselors learn from secular psychology and use biblical eyes to assess what they learn.
Maintaining Our Priorities
In the Cure of Souls, Powlison discusses tiered priorities, with the first priority being building our counseling model from Scripture, the second priority being biblically assessing non-biblical models, and:
“Our third priority must be to learn what we can from defective models. We will always be stimulated, challenged, and informed by those with whom we disagree and whom we aim to convert. Articulating our own model (1st) and critiquing other models (2nd) frees us to learn from others without being counter-converted or becoming syncretistic. Such learning also enables us to enter the frame of reference of those we hope to persuade” (14).
Thus, according to Powlison, biblical counselors are sufficiency-of-Scripture-centered, while being psychology-informed.
But what about specifics? In Powlison’s theology, what can biblical counselors learn from non-believers?
“The third priority: learning what we can from other models. We can learn from everything around us. Saying that God Himself ‘learns’ from ancient Near Eastern societies is inaccurate. But there is no doubt that God’s prophets and apostles learn from everything around them. God adapts His message to time, place, language, culture, and people. The Bible freely co-opts surrounding cultures as one aspect of God’s redemptive, transformative working. God’s servants work with what is around them linguistically, politically, religiously, economically, artistically, educationally, agriculturally, militarily. Committed to knowing the truth and critiquing error, they then appropriate lots of things. Redemption works with what is at hand, the “human documents,” both individual and social, and the cultural products” (15).
“From the standpoint of fundamental model building, such learning plays a distinctly tertiary role. But this third priority is not unimportant. Because we ourselves are both limited by finitude and tainted by sin, God often uses “perceptive error” to reprove His people. It’s part of how He makes us work to refine our understanding and application of His truth. Others may be seeing things we aren’t seeing, doing things we aren’t doing, asking questions we aren’t asking. God’s redemptive revelation is constitutive, but even counterbiblical theories may be provocative. And extra-biblical knowledge—of ourselves and our world—is always the grist with which biblical truth works continually to extend the range and depth of understanding. We learn, critique, reinterpret, convert, apply. We are able to traffic in the extra-biblical constructively when we know what we ought to know that reorients and controls our gaze (the first and second priorities)” (15).
“This is God’s world, so everything, even if it intends to efface God, bears witness to God—understood and reinterpreted through biblical eyeglasses. The Bible freely traffics in the extrabiblical, in the creation, in fallen cultural products, in the terminology of the very contemporary falsehoods that God is attacking. But God always interprets or reinterprets. He is imperial. Biblical truth is a corrective gaze” (15).
This is classic Powlison:
Eyes open to God’s world; eyes focused with the corrective lens of God’s Word.
Powlison explains how the Bible itself models how to engage with extra-biblical sources.
“The Bible never fears secular education. Moses was educated in all the learning of the Egyptians (Acts 7:22); God gave Daniel and his friends knowledge and intelligence in every branch of Chaldean literature and wisdom (Dan. 1:17); Paul was a man of great learning (Acts 22:3, 26:24). But Moses, Daniel, and Paul interpreted life through God’s redemptive grid. Paul could quote with favor an “anthropologist” who studied life in Crete (Titus 1:12), and he could weave the words of Greek literati into his argument in Athens (Acts 17:28). Where the living, speaking, seeing, acting God rules, His servants move freely into the culture of their time and place. The Bible gives no warrant for Christians to be intellectual isolationists, to be biblicistic, cut off from culture, speaking a private language to our own kind” (15).
Powlison does not give short shrift to this, instead, he gives frequent attention to the biblical counselor’s engagement with extra-biblical models.
“Third, we will develop our model through interacting with contemporary models. Their successes can certainly reprove us, and help us see more clearly places where we are inept and ignorant—as long as we do not counter-convert. Their observations of what makes human life go and not go can inform us—if we radically reinterpret them from within our world view. At every point, the first priority must be first, the second second, the third third” (16).
There it is again and again and again:
Engaged with the world; enlightened by God’s Word.
Eyes Wide Open
In Powlison’s theology, as long as we keep the first thing first—the authority/sufficiency of Scripture—then we can engage extra-biblical sources wisely.
“First, the necessity of reordering our priorities does not mean that it is wrong to closely study psychological, relational, and counseling processes. Exactly the opposite. Psychological study that submits itself to God’s truth becomes part of the joyous outworking of the church’s first priority. When we believe in the sufficiency of Scripture, we enter into a vast practical-theological task, not a concordance search for the proof-text for every problem. Adopting a frankly biblical worldview, we should get about the business of hard, fruitful study, in subordination to the mind of Christ” (16).
Notice that Powlison does not say, “a cursory study of psychology.” He says “closely study” modern psychotherapy theory and methodology. Sufficiency of Scripture, rather than shutting our eyes to the world, opens our eyes to engage and evaluate the world through the Word.
Instead of the sufficiency of Scripture secluding us from secular psychology, it motivates us to be psychology-informed.
“Careful ‘psychological’ study is one direct implication of the sufficiency of Scripture and of getting our first priority straight” (17).
We tend to think that the implication of sufficiency is avoiding being psychology-informed. Powlison claims the opposite. A “direct implication of the sufficiency of Scripture” is being psychology-informed—“careful ‘psychological’ study.”
Powlison and Adams
Is Powlison deviating from classic Jay Adams nouthetic counseling? Powlison does not believe so.
“Adams’s formal epistemology is a rather typically reformed transformationist position toward the observations and ideas of secular disciplines. He denied their necessity for constructing a systematic pastoral theology, but affirmed their potential usefulness when appropriated through Christian eyes. Epistemologically, Adams is a radical Christianizer of secularity, not a biblicistic xenophobe. He is no triumphalist, believing that Christian faith has already arrived at the sum of all wisdom, but believes that secular disciplines can both challenge and inform us” (30).
According to Powlison, Jay Adams was secular-psychology-informed while being sufficiency-of-Scripture-centered.
In a footnote, Powlison adds this about Adams:
“Adams’s transformationist attitude towards culture is most apparent in his attitudes towards medicine. He is less interested in and more suspicious of the social sciences, but never denies that things can be learned from anyone and everywhere. In The Christian Counselor’s Manual (p. 80), he even cited a swami favorably! Adams’s willingness to appropriate and rework insights from secular theorists is most evident in his discussions of moralistic therapies (e.g., Mowrer and Glasser) and existentialists (e.g., Frankl). No doubt, if Aaron Beck’s cognitive-behavioral therapy had been prominent in the early 1970s when Adams wrote in this vein, Beck would have come in for treatment similar to what was extended to the moralists and existentialists. Adams rarely demonstrated the same sort of carefully critical appreciation when discussing psychodynamic and humanistic psychologists, which in my view is a weakness in how he applied what he believed. The playing field is level, and none of the secular psychologies are either uniquely privileged or uniquely hobbled in comparison to each other” (footnote 3, page 35).
Adams learned from a swami! He appropriated insights from secular therapists—especially the behavioralists like Mowrer and Glasser. And notice what Powlison is saying. He would have gone further than Adams by studying and being informed by psychodynamic and humanistic psychologists.
In another footnote, Powlison argues against those who say that Adams was opposed to learning from psychology.
“Roger Hurding’s The Tree of Healing (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1985) is an exception to the ritual charge that Adams is against ‘psychology’. He recognized Adams’s principial willingness to learn from and interact with secular psychological knowledge and theory, but accurately observed that this was not a “developed argument” in Adams’s overall writing and practice (285)” (footnote 2, page 35).
Powlison agrees with Hurding: Jay Adams had a willingness to learn from secular psychological knowledge and theory.
Summarizing David Powlison
Based on the Cure of Souls, how might we summarize Powlison’s theology of biblical counseling and modern psychotherapies?
- Sufficiency-of-Scripture-centered and psychology-informed.
- Eyes open to God’s world; eyes focused with the corrective lens of God’s Word.
- Engaged with the world; enlightened by God’s Word.
- Engage and evaluate the world through the Word.
