What Should Christian Counseling Look Like?

Posted on July 26, 2009

What should Christian Counseling Look like?

(by Philip G. Monroe. Associate professor of Counseling & Psychology at Biblical Seminary. Dr. Monroe is our blogger for the month of July and this is his fourth post.)

This is a question I don’t intend to answer in this little post. However, I want to draw your attention to a book published in 2007 by H. Newton Malony and David Augsburger entitled, Christian Counseling: An Introduction (Abingdon Press).

Malony and Augsburger are well established professors at Fuller Seminary. In this little book they attempt to answer our question, What should Christian Counseling look like?

Here are some clues to what they want to accomplish in their book:

  1. We have no intention of doing a survey and, on the basis of the results, describing what Christian counselors do. In an unapologetic manner, we intend to detail the parameters of what we firmly believe should be the foundations and applications of Christian counseling” (viii).
  2. A change is afoot for them: “We perceived ourselves as training ‘Christians who counseled,’ more than ‘Christian counselors’” (vii).
  3. The change consists of a desire to rethink the foundations of the Christian faith on counseling practice: “We paid too much homage to current psychological theory instead of boldly proclaiming our explicit reflections on the implications of Christian faith for counseling practice” (vii).
  4. What has helped them move in this direction? Postmodern influences on psychology and philosophy of science and of knowing.

We should applaud their attempt and raise one question. We should applaud their willingness to identify how those involved in the integration of psychology and theology have been timid and wary of being explicitly Christian and biblical in one’s psychological theory. We should ask (as we read), however, are they re-thinking the model of integration from top to bottom or merely wishing to remove one specific issue within that model but continue with the same division of disciplines?

Consider Eric Johnson’s critique of the integrative task.

In different ways, the major approaches that most Christians have taken to psychology and soul care have assumed a disciplinary dichotomy between psychology and theology that has made it difficult to understand human nature holistically, through both empirical research and what the Bible teaches. Embedded in the modern conceptual framework that makes this particularly disciplinary division plausible, a more foundation question of this dichotomy has been simply inconceivable. But we must ask, from where did this disciplinary division arise? (p. 131 of his Foundations of Soul Care)

It may be that if we are going to make real progress in defining and delimiting Christian counseling, we have to first start with re-thinking how to deal with an unhelpful but longlasting division of disciplines.

Evaluating Models of Christian Psychology

Posted on July 20, 2009

What is a Competent Christian Counselor?

Posted on July 12, 2009

Christian Psychology is Community Psychology

Posted on July 2, 2009

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