CHAPTER TEN
Christian Counseling and the Conservative Moral Sensibility
The fact is this. Among the men who are pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge, there are devoted men of God who know and honor God’s Word. There are those in psychology, psychiatry and other professions who consistently use the Bible in their counseling. They attest that the Bible advances itself ahead of every generation and continues to be the most effective tool and remedy in the hands of any counselor.
—CLYDE NARRAMORE, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COUNSELING (1960)
IN THE EARLY 1960S, as pastoral counselors moved toward a model of caregiving for the pastor and specialization for the pastoral counselor, a new kind of counseling began to take shape. Its proponents self-identified as evangelical, fundamentalist, or conservative Christians and referred to the counseling and psychotherapy they offered as Christian, in contrast to pastoral or secular counseling. In his important inaugural essay for the Journal of Psychology and Theology, editor Bruce Narramore explained the distinctive characteristics of “Christian psychology” and “Christian counselors,” challenging Christians who wished to counsel to approach the practice with the right attitude: “a respect for the complete inspiration and authority of the Scriptures,” “a commitment to the scientific method and rigorous academic study,” “a personal commitment to Jesus Christ,” and “respect for both the Christian and the secular community.” The terms Narramore chose to use were problematic, since other kinds of counseling, such as pastoral counseling, were also Christian. Narramore did not say that pastoral counselors were not Christian, but he did say that the liberal church had been too much influenced by psychoanalysis, Carl Rogers, and existentialism, and he noted, “They have no hope of developing a biblically sound perspective of psychology since they have forsaken the authoritative teachings of the Scriptures.”1
Throughout this chapter I use the terms “Christian counselors” or “evangelical counselors” and “Christian counseling” because those were the words these counselors used to describe themselves and the work they were doing. I have elected to use their terms, but by doing so I do not mean to imply that I agree with Narramore’s assessment of pastoral counselors and liberal churches.
These Christian counselors were concerned about what they saw as increasing secularization of American society and especially the secular and, in some cases antireligious, nature of psychological theories. They were particularly critical of the pastoral counseling movement, arguing that pastoral counselors were too much in debt to secular psychology, particularly Rogers and Freud, and so were failing to meet their pastoral obligations to their counselees.2 There was clearly some overlap of traditional pastoral counselors and the new evangelical counselors, since critiques of Rogers and Freud had appeared regularly in the pastoral counseling literature for nearly two decades. But, for the most part, the evangelical critique of psychiatry and pastoral counseling came from a different social and cultural location. Christian counseling was dominated by psychologists and psychiatrists rather than clergy. Because they already had established professional credentials, they did not worry much about the distinction between psychotherapy and counseling that had bothered pastoral counselors, who had been engaged in carving out a professional niche. But they did struggle to define a distinctively Christian therapy, and during this process the outlines of a shared conservative moral sensibility emerged. The liberal moral sensibility is illuminated in contrast to it.
The Professional Context of Christian Counseling
At least one part of the professional context in which Christian counseling emerged was the antipsychiatry movement that was provoking so much discussion among pastoral counselors in the early 1960s. Unlike their pastoral counseling colleagues, however, a significant number of evangelical counselors found the antipsychiatry movement appealing. This resulted in part from their perception that most non-Christian psychiatrists ignored, discounted, or were openly hostile to religion and religious values. Psychologist O. Hobart Mowrer and psychiatrist William Glasser were not clergy, but they raised questions that Christian counselors found compelling. Mowrer’s critique of Freud’s ideas regarding the etiology of mental illness and William Glasser’s specific instructions about how to apply that critique in therapeutic settings combined in a particularly attractive package.
Glasser’s Reality Therapy, published in 1965 with a preface written by Mowrer, gave detailed guidance about how to challenge “the myth of mental illness” in the therapeutic setting. In the first half of the book, Glasser laid out the basic concepts of reality therapy and explained how it differed from conventional therapy. The second half of the book was devoted to illustrating the practice of reality therapy in a variety of mental health settings. One of the most important things about reality therapy was that it offered an alternative to psychoanalysis, in much the same way that Rogers’s non-directive counseling offered an accessible alternative for pastoral counselors. Reality therapy was not really systematic but instead was idiosyncratic and based on the needs of the client or patient. It was in some ways characterized by what one did not talk about—the past or the origin of one’s problems. The patient was encouraged to talk about what he or she was doing rather than why he or she was doing something—to focus on behavior rather than on the feelings associated with that behavior or insight into the origin of that behavior. This meant, according to Glasser, that almost any topic was open to discussion, from sports to philosophy, so that the relationship or “involvement” between the therapist and the patient deepened. In the context of a warm and loving relationship in which the patient was respected, he or she could devise a plan for his or her life: face reality, take responsibility, and engage in “right or moral behavior.” Glasser defined right or moral behavior as “when a man acts in such a way that he gives and receives love, and feels worthwhile to himself and others.”3 Glasser acknowledged that this kind of therapy did not always make people “happy,” but he declared that it would give them a certain amount of peace and, although he did not use the word specifically, success. In the case studies Glasser included in his book, he described individuals achieving success in their work and in fostering stable relationships. One young man went to medical school, while another completed multiple projects and was promoted even in the midst of recurring bouts of depression; one young woman lost fifty pounds, and another gave up sexual promiscuity.4
Some evangelical counselors also turned to the work of Anton Boisen for their understanding of the etiology of mental illness. Mowrer played an important role in giving Boisen a higher profile among these counselors than one might expect, given his social location within liberal Protestantism. In his discussion of church, clergy, and psychology, Mowrer cited Boisen’s works frequently, including references to personal correspondence with Boisen. In his chapter in The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion (1960), entitled “Guilt, Confession, and Expiation,” Mowrer quoted Boisen extensively. In his collection Morality and Mental Health (1967) he included an excerpt from Boisen’s Exploration of the Inner World (1936). References to Boisen subsequently appeared in the works of evangelical counselors. For instance, Gary Collins, in his book Search for Reality (1969), used Boisen’s definition of mental illness when he defined abnormality, noting the possibility, as Boisen had argued, that emotional illness could be caused by an individual’s failure to live up to his or her own expectations or standards.5 In some ways, the embrace of Boisen by the antipsychiatry movement and Christian counselors made sense. More than thirty years earlier, Boisen had also launched a critique of the psychiatric establishment that included a rejection of Freud’s ideas. At the same time, there were significant differences between Boisen and his new champions which they failed to recognize. Boisen, in contrast to many in the antipsychiatry movement, saw a more complicated psychological process in which the struggle toward God and the perception of failure in that struggle caused the personality to disintegrate before reintegrating. In Boisen’s model, simple confession did not necessarily lead to healing.
In some ways, the antipsychiatric movement had more in common with the kind of counseling advocated by John Sutherland Bonnell and Charles Holman, who in the 1930s had promoted pastoral counsel that drew a straight line from sin (especially unconfessed sin) to emotional distress and who advocated a strenuous moral effort as part of one’s mental hygiene. The language Glasser used in describing the counseling process, in which the counselee had to “face reality” in order to succeed, echoes that of Holman in Cure of Souls, in which he too talked about the importance of facing reality in the interest of making adjustment, or that of Cabot and Dicks, who argued in The Art of Ministering to the Sick that growth required “not turning away from reality.” Most Christian counselors did not cite the cure of souls literature, perhaps because it was so firmly embedded in the liberal tradition.
Boisen’s work was probably more attractive because it also focused on the scientific study of religious experience and the integration of psychology and theology rather than on pastoral practice—an emphasis that appealed to the psychologists and psychiatrists who dominated in Christian counseling. Almost all of its leaders had psychology backgrounds, even if they, for one reason or another, subsequently took positions at seminaries, divinity schools, and schools of theology. For instance, Donald Tweedie was a professor of psychology who started out at Gordon College and later moved to a position as director of the Pasadena Community Counseling Center, which was associated with the School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary. Fuller’s School of Psychology was founded with the specific purpose of providing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology that integrated a theological perspective rather than offering training in pastoral counseling or pastoral psychology.6 Clyde Narramore, one of the seminal figures in evangelical counseling, had a doctorate in education and came out of the guidance tradition. His nephew, Bruce, with whom he founded the Narramore Foundation, held a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Kentucky. Paul Tournier, another influential figure, was a Swiss medical doctor. Gary Collins, who held a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Purdue University and exercised a long-term and wide-ranging influence on the movement, was on the faculty at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School for twenty years beginning in the mid-1960s.
The dominance of counselors with doctoral degrees in psychology in the movement helps explain a number of of its characteristcs. First, there was almost no debate about the relative merits of counseling versus psychotherapy. In the 1940s the question of turf and which professions could legitimately offer counsel and psychotherapy was still highly contested. In the intervening years, clinical psychologists had made a strong move to claim that territory for themselves. By the 1960s, ministers were viewed increasingly as inadequately trained trespassers encroaching upon territory that rightfully belonged to psychologists. Among evangelical psychologists the question was not whether they should offer counseling or psychotherapy but how they would integrate the principles and practices of their faith with the principles and practices of their profession. The dominance of psychology Ph.D.s did not mean that evangelical and fundamentalist ministers without that degree were not engaged in counseling. The result was sharp and occasionally bitter disagreements between the two groups, disputes that escalated in the 1980s over the issue of whether ministers ought to offer either counseling or psychotherapy.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the disagreements were still relatively minor. In fact, two parish ministers exercised significant influence on Christian counseling and, probably not incidentally, represented the most conservative end of the spectrum. Tim LaHaye had no background or expertise in counseling or psychology and later moved on to other interests, but he claimed expertise in counseling on the basis of eighteen years in the parish ministry, and he based his book, The Spirit-Controlled Temperament (1966), on a handful of books and the lectures of leading Christian psychologists, especially Henry Brandt. Jay Adams, on the other hand, who also had significant parish experience, had a fair amount of postgraduate seminary education, including exposure to clinical pastoral education and a period of training with O. Hobart Mowrer. Both LaHaye and Adams eventually came under fire from their colleagues, LaHaye because he was not scholarly enough and Adams both for his methods, something he called “nouthetic counseling,” and for his combative style.
Historian David Powlison details the criticisms leveled at Adams by other evangelical counselors in what Powlison terms a “jurisdictional” dispute. He records evangelical counselors’ dislike for what they saw as Adams’s misinterpretation of both the Bible and secular psychologies (and his misunderstanding of the relationship between the two), his heavy-handed moral judgments and directive style, and, most importantly, his insistence that counseling was the special province of ministers and lay people, while psychologists were specifically excluded. Powlison argues that evangelical psychotherapists won the jurisdictional war in the 1980s, while the independent organizations for nouthetic counseling that Adams established languished.7 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the battle had only just begun, and Adams was still very much a part of the conversation. In spite of their differences, Adams and the evangelical psychotherapists shared a common moral sensibility.8
One other prominent figure in the evangelical counseling movement is important, because of the way his work illustrates two significant trends in Christian counseling. John Drakeford, professor of psychology and counseling at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, established a thriving pastoral counseling training program based on the theories and methods of “integrity therapy.” Like Adams, Drakeford was familiar with both traditional pastoral counseling and clinical pastoral education, was not a psychologist, and had studied with Mowrer, at which point he was exposed to the basic concepts of integrity therapy, a term he credited Mowrer with coining.9 Although Drakeford’s primary commitment was to training ministers, his integrity therapy was built on group therapy and made extensive use of lay counseling. Both Adams and Drakeford emphasized the role of lay involvement in the counseling process. Drakeford specifically credited Mowrer’s approach with restoring the minister to the counseling process and opening the position of counselor to any “perceptive and interested” person who wished to help.10 In the jurisdictional battles within evangelical counseling, the issue of lay counseling remained a contentious one; ministers tended to embrace it and the degreed psychologists viewed it with suspicion.
Drakeford’s association with the Southern Baptist denomination is also important. Historically, Southern Baptists had thrown their lot with clinical pastoral education and pastoral counseling. Both were part of a larger trend among Southern Baptists, who had managed for decades to maintain a quirky mix of southern progressivism and old-fashioned evangelical fervor.11 In the 1970s, conservatives launched the historic “takeover” of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was firmly established by the 1990s.12 The new leadership steered the denomination toward alliances with other evangelicals rather than with the mainline denominations. In his affiliation with the antipsychiatry movement and his embrace of lay therapy, Drakeford represented the leading edge of the conservative groundswell within the Southern Baptist Convention.
Southern Baptists were important to the emerging Christian counseling movement, but they did not predominate. Instead, neoevangelicals controlled much of the discourse of “Christian counseling.” Those conservative Christians who self-identified as neoevangelicals were heirs to the Calvinist fundamentalist tradition that had developed since the 1920s and was characterized by a commitment to biblical inerrancy, dispensational premillenialism, and political and religious separatism. That movement had led to the founding of numerous new seminaries, colleges, churches, and parachurch organizations. Neoevangelicals tended to be more willing than their predecessors had been to make alliances with other evangelicals, including Pentecostal, Holiness, and Anabaptist Christians. And, as George Marsden has argued in Reforming Fundamentalism, by the middle to late 1960s, neoevangelicals controlled Fuller Theological Seminary, which was also the site of one of the earliest doctoral programs in Christian psychology.13 Fuller, along with Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois and Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston, represented the heart of fundamentalist and neoevangelical theological education, while Wheaton, Westmont, and Gordon Colleges played a similar role at the undergraduate level.14
As religious outsiders in their secular profession, evangelical psychologists, counselors, and psychotherapists were intensely aware of the issues of professional credentialing and scholarly legitimacy. They entered the fray at about the same time that traditional pastoral counselors began to distance themselves from the parish and establish an independent professional existence (the American Association of Pastoral Counselors incorporated in 1964) and at about the same time that the lines between the various vocational groups—clinical psychologists, psychiatric social workers, and guidance personnel—were beginning to reify, fashioning carefully delimited standards for accreditation or certification.15 The context of professionalization helps to explain the uneasy relationship between the Christian psychologists and counseling clergy, whether mainline or evangelical. It meant, too, that evangelical Christians who wished to counsel needed secular professional credentials as well as their own professional organizations that were recognized by secular institutions such as the American Psychological Association (APA). They sought both.
For instance, Bruce Narramore, who had earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Kentucky, was instrumental in founding Christian doctoral education that became APA accredited. He was founding dean of Rosemead Graduate School of Psychology, which later merged with Biola University and oversaw the establishment of the premier academic journal for evangelical psychologists, the Journal of Psychology and Theology. The administration at Fuller Theological Seminary followed suit, establishing a School of Psychology in 1965 and the Pasadena Community Counseling Center, which served the school’s research agenda, and hiring Donald Tweedie and Paul Barkman, both with Ph.D.s in clinical psychology.16 Wheaton College, the flagship of neoevangelical undergraduate education, and George Fox University had established clinical psychology doctoral programs by the turn of the twenty-first century. To underline the possibility of combining high professional standards and committed faith, evangelical psychologists were quick to point out past presidents of the APA who were outspokenly Christian, such as Paul Meehl and Gordon Allport.
Evangelicals also launched a number of professional associations and related journals for counselors and psychotherapists, although they did not rely on those associations for accreditation or certification, instead looking to the APA for validation. Rosemead’s Journal of Psychology and Theology focused on attracting both academic and professional readers. The Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS), established in the mid-1950s, published the Journal of Psychology and Christianity with an eye on a similar market. The American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC), which, under the leadership of Gary Collins, in the 1990s grew phenomenally, published the more practically oriented Journal of Christian Counseling.
The Conservative Moral Sensibility
The individuals who came together, then, to establish “Christian counseling” included a diverse group of theologically conservative Protestants— fundamentalists, neoevangelicals, the new evangelical alliance—and counted among their ranks Christian psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and ministers as well as a number of old-style pastoral counselors hailing primarily from Southern Baptist and Evangelical Lutheran backgrounds. The outlines of this approach to counseling were first articulated in a handful of seminal works published between 1960 and 1975 that illuminate the contours of the conservative moral sensibility.17 In general, the central recurring issues in the evangelical counseling literature revolved around questions about the proper “integration” of psychology and theology. More specifically, early members of this movement devoted a significant amount of print to exploring the apparent lack of interest in values and moral standards among secular psychologists, the authority of scripture in effective counseling, the power of God, the depth of human sinfulness, and the importance of all these concepts for the theory and practice of Christian counseling. In their discussions the conservative moral sensibility predominated and stood in stark contrast to the liberal moral sensibility.
Psychiatry and Values
Early practitioners of Christian counseling argued that secular therapists, psychiatrists in particular, did not pay enough attention to matters of values. What these Christian counselors meant by “values” ranged widely. It seemed to encompass not only questions of right and wrong but questions about human nature and specifically about whether human beings had a spiritual dimension that should be addressed as part of therapy. Donald Tweedie’s Logotherapy and the Christian Faith (1961) is a good example of this critique. The book resulted from Tweedie’s interest in identifying psychological theories that were compatible with Christian values. Tweedie had been a professor of psychology at Gordon College before moving to Fuller Theological Seminary and the directorship of the counseling center there. Earlier, on a sabbatical from Gordon, Tweedie had spent some time at the Vienna Polyclinic, where Viktor Frankl was the director of the neurological and psychotherapeutic department of the clinic, engaging Frankl in conversation, observing Frankl’s clinical activities, and reading his published works.18
Tweedie was looking for a psychological theory in which the spiritual dimension of human existence was accepted and valued, and he argued that Frankl’s logotherapy and existential analysis offered a viable alternative to what the rest of psychology was offering. In Tweedie’s judgment, most modern psychology had been too much influenced by behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and a relentless empiricism that had resulted in a rejection of anything that even hinted at religion or metaphysics. Tweedie argued that one’s philosophy of human nature and whether one believed that human beings possessed a spiritual dimension were critical. In his view, behaviorism was notoriously mechanistic. Psychoanalysis was equally problematic given that Freud had written an entire book in which he had described religion as an illusion.19 From Tweedie’s perspective, scientific psychology refused to consider as valid anything that could not be measured in a laboratory, and this attitude had bred a generation of psychologists who at best saw the religious impulse as immaturity and at worst as mental illness. Psychology had, as Tweedie expressed it, “traded its birthright of philosophical self-consciousness for the pottage of positivistic verification.”20
Equally damning in Tweedie’s view was that psychology was not truly scientific in the first place. Many of its presuppositions, he argued, were just as much acts of faith as any religious belief, even as it claimed superiority by virtue of being more scientific.21 As Tweedie saw it, secular psychiatrists—who were the particular object of evangelical distrust and disdain—had first devalued values, then imposed their own values, either implicitly or explicitly, on their patients.22
The Authority of Scripture
The values that members of the Christian counseling movement claimed as important they found in the Bible. In fact, the authority of the scripture was one of the most important guiding principles for these counselors; it shaped their theory and practice fundamentally, and it is pivotal to understanding the conservative moral sensibility. Without exception, Christian counselors called for a biblically based psychology and a therapeutic method guided by the authority of the scripture. While they all agreed on the centrality of the scripture, they disagreed about what that meant for the relationship between religion and science. The scientific method and biblical revelation sometimes were pitted against each other. Jay Adams, for instance, stated very clearly at the beginning of his 1970 work, Competent to Counsel, that his book was not based on “scientific findings.” His book, he claimed, was “presuppositional.” That is, he worked from the presupposition that “the inerrant Bible is the Standard of all faith and practice. The Scriptures, therefore, are the basis, and contain the criteria by which I have sought to make every judgment.”23 Adams did not deny the importance of science. In fact, he claimed it as a “useful adjunct for the purposes of illustrating, filling in generalizations with specifics, and challenging wrong human interpretations of Scripture.”24 Adams seemed to be arguing that it was acceptable to illustrate biblical principles with scientific examples, but it was not acceptable to illustrate scientific principles with biblical examples, because the latter would imply that science had a greater authority than the Bible, a view Adams rejected. To maintain that authority, Adams insisted that everything human beings needed to know about human nature and psychology could be found in the Bible, and science served only to corroborate biblical principles.
Gary Collins, who was also representative of the conservative moral sensibility and placed a high value on the authority of the scripture, drew somewhat different conclusions about the relationship between science and religion. For a significant portion of his career, Collins was a professor and chair of the Division of Psychology and Counseling at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. While Adams wanted to subordinate science to religion, Collins wanted to put religion and science on an equal footing. More accurately, making an argument that was narrower and more easily defensible, Collins attempted to place Christian and secular psychotherapy on an equal footing. He argued that this could be achieved only by establishing a sound scientific and intellectual base for Christian counseling and by making a logical and rational case for the Christian view. He also argued, however, that to make the case for the legitimacy of Christian counseling it was necessary to recognize that both Christian and secular therapy began at the same point—with a series of assumptions that were “unstated, unrecognized, and uncritically accepted by faith.”25 He pointed out that Christians had an obligation to “clarify [their presuppositions], to state them explicitly, to test them against the revealed words of scripture, to support them philosophically, and to postulate them as convincingly as we know how.”26
The difference in these two men’s social locations shaped their views regarding the scientific method. Adams, a Reformed clergyman, set the world of scholarship aside in a sphere separate from the world of faith. Collins, with a Ph.D. in psychology, called for the use of the academic apparatus, including “journals, books, lectures, and classroom discussions,” to demonstrate the viability of a Christian framework.27 Collins was not saying that Christian psychologists ought to allow the Christian world view to be subordinated to the scientific world view. Instead, he was arguing that each Christian psychologist had an obligation to be an “intellectual witness to non-Christian psychologists” and to defend a biblically based psychology using terms and methods that secular psychologists would understand. This, Collins argued, required using “carefully designed research techniques” and “solid data” to demonstrate the greater logic of theism compared to naturalism, the superiority of revelation to empiricism, the desirability of a biblically based ethics, and the practicality of a life based on a relationship with a “loving and forgiving God.”28
The difference between Collins and Adams is well illustrated in their approach to the Bible and what they thought the Bible contributed to psychological knowledge and counseling methodology. Adams saw the Bible as definitive and the sole authority in all matters. Collins, while equally enamored of scripture and unwilling to limit the “power of the Word of God” in any way, was reluctant to say that Christians who had a Bible need never consult a psychologist. Instead, Collins argued that the Bible contained good examples of counseling as well as words of encouragement and comfort but was not the only source of psychological help.29
For those of a conservative moral sensibility, their beliefs about the authority of the scripture also had consequences for what they believed about moral standards. Regardless of where he or she fell on the spectrum of the conservative moral sensibility, each author seemed to see it as a duty to mention that moral standards were objective. By “objective standards” they meant that there were rules that had to be followed, rules that transcended time and place, rules that existed outside of subjective experience. In his critique of the kind of psychology that focused on “adjustment,” for instance, Gary Collins argued that the Bible taught that God has “standards of right and wrong which go beyond culture” in contrast to a “culturalistic” view in which there was no “external standard of behavior.”30
Most simply, following objective moral standards meant that when the counselee faced moral choices, the Christian counselor was supposed to use the Bible as the starting point for guiding and instructing the counselee. Clyde Narramore, who, along with Paul Tournier, led the way in defining the basic character of evangelical counseling in the early 1960s, devoted an entire chapter of his book, The Psychology of Counseling (1960), to “The Use of Scripture in Counseling.” Applying the scripture in this way was predicated on certain assumptions about the nature of the Bible which in turn led Christian counselors to assume that the Bible provided a clear and objective standard of behavior. For these counselors, affirming the revealed and authoritative nature of scripture was essential.31 To claim the Bible as a guide for living, it was necessary, in their view, to establish the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.
Narramore began his chapter on using scripture in counseling with an extended discussion of the power and nature of the Bible. He began by describing the transformative effect of scripture in the lives of two men, one a hydraulic engineer and the other a “top man of science” who while vacationing in the country “strolled into a nearby Bible conference … and invited Christ into his life.” In telling these stories Narramore made a number of assumptions that were revealing of the conservative moral sensibility. When he claimed that the men were “transformed by God’s Word,” he also claimed that God’s Word was “the same as the Living Word who had come from heaven [Jesus Christ]” to die for the sins of human beings. It was Jesus who transformed lives, and the Bible was powerful only to the extent that it was identified with Jesus. Narramore went on to celebrate the Bible, claiming, “No sound technique or valuable discovery of science will ever be contrary to or complete without, the revelation of God’s Word” and that, no matter what human beings might say, the Bible remained “the objective and eternal Word of God.”32 The Bible was also, according to Narramore, a “glorious authority for life itself,” a “manual and guide book for our daily lives,” and, quoting Paul’s Second Epistle to Timothy, “God-breathed—given by His Inspiration— and profitable for instruction.”33 Narramore included an appendix of Bible verses that could be used in counseling, grouping the verses under headings such as “anxiety and worry,” “comfort,” “sin,” and “temptation.” About half of the verses were intended for giving comfort and encouragement. The other half were to be used to direct, guide, and advise the counselee. Narramore included a separate listing of Bible verses intended to be used in “soul winning.”34
Probably no work so clearly illustrates the diverging paths of the liberal and conservative moral sensibilities than Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics, published in 1966 just as the American cultural revolution was escalating. Fletcher was a senior member of the clinical pastoral education movement and had participated in the founding of the Graduate School of Applied Religion in the 1930s. In the 1950s, when pastoral counselors were struggling to define the “ethic of relationships” and the nature of “responsible freedom,” Fletcher had contributed significantly to the debate. His publications in the 1960s represented the logical conclusion of work begun decades earlier. Fear of and discomfort with situation ethics, a term Fletcher coined, was palpable in both popular and professional journals of conservative Christians. At the time he wrote Situation Ethics, Fletcher considered himself a Christian and believed that situation ethics were not simply compatible with a Christian ethic but were, in fact, the way Jesus himself made ethical decisions. Fletcher deviated from the conservative moral sensibility in two critical and fundamental ways. First, he insisted that the only absolute in human existence was love: “Love is a predicate … the one and only regulative principle of Christian ethics.”35 Everything else, including the definition of good and evil and right and wrong, depended on the situation or the circumstances. There was, in other words, no objective standard for moral behavior. He dismissed rules and codes as legalism and moralism and a violation of love.
The second problem with Fletcher’s thinking, for conservative Christians, was his attitude toward biblical authority. While he quoted frequently from the Bible, he did not consider himself a biblicist and certainly did not see the Bible as offering an objective standard for moral behavior. In Fletcher’s view, the final authority in every moral decision had to be love, not the Bible. For Fletcher, moral decision making was grounded in something he called neo-casuistry. Classical casuistry moved from individual cases to principles and rules. Fletcher embraced the old case method—it echoed his own experience in the case study method used in CPE—but rather than moving from cases to larger principles or rules, Fletcher considered each case independently and made decisions about right and wrong depending on the situation. He was not above taking a shot or two at the legalists, moralists, and biblicists, accusing them of a kind of cowardice. He disparaged their need for rules and their unwillingness to take moral risks—to risk being wrong or mistaken or to “sin bravely,” a phrase he borrowed from Martin Luther. Fletcher by no means represented all liberal theologians of the era. What he did represent was the ethic of responsibility taken its furthest and perhaps logical conclusion—the polar opposite of the conservative moral sensibility.
Christian counselors’ commitment to the authority of scripture also shaped their beliefs about gender. It was here that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and more specifically biblical literalism became pivotal. Margaret Bendroth in Fundamentalism and Gender argued that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century arguments among evangelicals for women’s equality in the life of the church were based on a “non-literal and thematic reading” of scripture that was rooted in “Wesleyan and perfectionist” Christianity.36 The problem for evangelical counselors in the latter half of the twentieth century was that neoevangelical dominance in “Christian counseling” meant that a quite different approach to scripture prevailed.
In general, Christian counselors tended not to mention gender explicitly except where forced to. Their writing reveals the sort of gender stereotyping that was common and generally accepted in those years, including the use of the inclusive “he” to talk about human nature and a tendency to use examples from women’s experience to illustrate pathology. Even among those whose thought fell on the more liberal end of the spectrum, the tendency was to assume that women’s problems revolved around home and household and men’s problems revolved around work and achievement. And while none among them would have claimed to support the double standard in sexual behavior, examples of sexual dysfunction or misconduct tended to be drawn, again, from women’s experience. The image of Eve, the temptress, persisted.
When specific discussions of gender equality arose, Christian counselors turned to the Bible—to a certain way of reading the Bible. This approach is best illustrated in an article printed in the Journal of Psychology and Theology in the mid-1970s. While the author’s views did not reflect those of all Christian counselors, they did represent the views of some, particularly those who favored a literal reading of scripture and emphasized biblical inerrancy. The author was George W. Knight III, an assistant professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary, who offered an interpretation from the perspective of reformed theology. Knight started by reaffirming the “inspiration, inerrancy, and absolute authority” of the Bible. On this basis Knight argued that the New Testament gave clear instruction regarding God’s order and the roles established by God, including the roles of men and women in the marriage relationship and the roles of men and women in church leadership. Knight argued that, while the Bible clearly affirmed the “spiritual equality” of men and women, it equally clearly affirmed a hierarchical relationship between men and women in which women were to submit to men as part of a larger hierarchy in which men submitted to Christ and Christ to God.37
Knight was careful to argue not only for a particular view of scripture but also for a particular approach to exegesis. He insisted that only those “didactic passages” that specifically addressed the relationship of husbands and wives and the place of women in the church could be used to understand the roles of men and women. The subtext here was that using the scripture to extract general principles regarding men’s and women’s roles was an improper and unacceptable approach to exegesis.38
Other views both of the scripture and of women’s roles percolated through the constituency. One disgruntled reader canceled his subscription to the journal after the Knight article was published. The letter writer, Richard Nielson, described Knight’s work as an “offensive piece of twaddle” and his scholarship as “sophomoric.” Nielson was also quick to point out the inconsistency of treating the biblical discussion of women’s roles as normative and the discussion of slavery as situational. The editors responded in carefully neutral language that they had “attempted to publish articles on the role of women from various evangelical perspectives” and then gave the references for the other articles.39 One of the reasons Knight had written the article in the first place was because the argument that there was a biblical basis for women’s equality had been gaining currency in evangelical circles. Knight pointed particularly to recent articles in Christianity Today, to a book by the journal’s editor, Harold Lindsell, called The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1973), and to a book by two women, Leeza Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, entitled All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation (1974). Knight was most troubled by what he saw as a tendency among these Christians to argue that the scripture regarding women’s subordination was culturally relative and not “normative” for the present. Instead, Knight argued that the only portion of the New Testament that was culturally relative and meant to regulate existing conditions was the teaching on the relationship of servants and masters. He apparently meant this as a preemptive strike against those who might accuse him of suggesting that the Bible supported slavery. Knight did not explain why this one particular case was culturally relative and others were not. In any case, his argument was framed to engage evangelicals who interpreted scripture differently than he did and who drew very different conclusions, even as they took a “high” view of scripture.
The Journal of Psychology and Theology had earlier given equal time to Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. Mollenkott was a psychologist widely read in evangelical circles in the 1970s who spoke strongly in favor of gender equality. She and those who shared her views drew on scripture but with a broader and more contextual reading—just the sort of reading to which Knight objected. Both kinds of evangelicals placed a high value on scripture, but they disagreed about how scripture should be interpreted. Those with the most literal interpretation of scripture represented one end of the spectrum of the conservative moral sensibility and had the most specific understanding of gender roles. In their view, the Bible was very clear about what women should and should not be allowed to do. It was, moreover, a moral issue for them; allowing or encouraging women to teach in defiance of the Bible violated God’s law.
Evangelicals on the other end of the spectrum also placed a high value on scriptural authority, but they argued that scripture should be interpreted in its cultural context and read in terms of the larger principles it was conveying. This was no less a high view of scripture, and these evangelicals were every bit as orthodox in their theology and in their view of the transcendence of God, every bit as convinced that the Bible was the inspired word of God, but were also convinced that human beings were required to read and interpret the Bible with the aid of God’s Spirit. For evangelicals of this bent, to be evangelical meant to believe in the miraculous and supernatural presence of the God in the world but not necessarily to subscribe to a position of biblical literalism and inerrancy, which they regarded as the legacy of fundamentalism.
A Transcendent, Sovereign God
Christian counselors did tend to place a greater emphasis on the power, transcendence, and sovereignty of God than had their counterparts in pastoral counseling. By the mid-1960s pastoral counselors were certainly talking more explicitly about God’s power to change lives, but not in the same language that their evangelical counterparts did and certainly not with the same emphasis on the miraculous and supernatural. Christian counselors’ beliefs about the nature of God, like their beliefs regarding the authority of scripture, had consequences for their theory and practice. Almost without exception, psychologists who self-identified as evangelical claimed belief in a transcendent, sovereign God who intervened in human affairs and made change possible. Consequently, they also reaffirmed the sinfulness of human nature and the absolute impossibility of change apart from God. That is, they juxtaposed human helplessness with the power of God. These beliefs had important consequences for counseling theory—especially given what they believed about the etiology of mental illness—and for counseling practice.
In particular, the affirmation of human sinfulness led to their criticizing the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers. In the view of Christian counselors, both men had advanced theories that undermined the concepts of human sinfulness and personal responsibility. Mowrer had argued that Freudian and Rogerian approaches thus hindered healing and were ineffective. To evangelicals it seemed that the views of Freud and Rogers also undermined God’s sovereignty, by challenging a biblically ordained hierarchy. Freud’s theory of the unconscious, in which mental illness resulted from unresolved instinctual conflicts, seemed to suggest that human beings were sick not sinful and so could not be held responsible for their behavior. This argument got much of its energy from Mowrer’s critique and was expressed most vociferously by Jay Adams. Adams argued that Freud sent individuals digging in their past in order to find someone to blame for their inadequacies instead of squarely facing their sin, repenting, and attempting to conform to biblical standards.40 Adams complained, “The idea of sickness as the cause of personal problems”—an idea Adams attributed to Freud—“vitiates all notions of human responsibility.”41 Evangelicals’ objections to Freud and psychoanalysis were strengthened by the fear that psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists would, in the name of mental health, actively work to free individuals from their inhibitions, which would, in turn, transform them into “impulsive, irresponsible sinners.”42
Much of Rogerian theory was considered equally problematic. Rogers’s assumptions about the fundamental goodness of human beings were deemed overly optimistic and seemed to stand in direct opposition to what the Bible said about human nature. Both Freud and Rogers were thus seen as circumventing, in different ways, what was for Christian counselors a fact—human sinfulness. Freudian theory excused the individual from responsibility for sin while Rogerian theory ignored or downplayed the presence of sin in the life of the individual.
For Christian counselors, this was as much a theological issue as a psychological one. Not all of them assumed that all mental illness was caused by sin. Nor did they assume that because they rejected much of Freud’s theory that they need necessarily reject the idea that some guilt was false and unnecessary. They struggled with how to distinguish between real, or true, guilt caused by breaking God’s laws and false guilt accompanied by a vague sense of discomfort and worry about having failed to meet one’s own or others’ expectations. Paul Tournier, the Swiss medical doctor who widely influenced early evangelical counseling, elaborated the terms of this debate in his book Guilt and Grace. Tournier aimed at a popular audience, and the book consisted of a collection of anecdotes drawn from his medical practice and personal experience. Bruce Narramore and Bill Counts took up the same themes in their book, Freedom from Guilt, also aiming for a popular audience but taking a more systematic approach to addressing the issue. In their book, Narramore and Counts argued that some of the difficulties could be resolved by defining guilt more carefully. They divided guilt into four categories: “civil” or “legal” guilt, in which individuals broke the civil law and were guilty whether they felt guilty or not; “theological” guilt, which was caused by Adam’s fall and the sinfulness of human nature and caused separation from God, but which could be remedied by salvation; “psychological” guilt, the feeling of guilt, regardless of whether the individual was truly guilty; and “constructive sorrow,” the term that Narramore and Counts preferred to “true guilt,” and which led to permanent change in the life of an individual.43 The distinction between true and false guilt was an important one because, from the perspective of Christian counselors, the only kind of guilt that most psychiatrists acknowledged or addressed was psychological guilt, and they failed to ask whether that guilt was legitimate. Evangelical psychologists, as well as many in the antipsychiatry movement, argued that true guilt needed to be addressed because, for some individuals at least, recognizing their own sinfulness, repenting, and making restitution led to emotional healing.
Similarly, although they rejected Rogers’s optimism about human nature, they did not assume that there was nothing good about human beings, and they struggled to find a balance between acknowledging human sinfulness and encouraging self-esteem in their counselees. Narramore and Counts took up the question specifically: How was it possible to acknowledge one’s fallenness and maintain a good sense of self-esteem? Returning to their fourfold definition of guilt, Narramore and Counts argued that while individuals needed to recognize that they were indeed fallen, they also needed to recognize that they were special, created in the image of God, and loved unconditionally by God. They argued, further, that salvation removed the theological guilt of individuals so that even if they sinned after they became Christians, that sin did not separate them from God or mean that God loved them any less. According to Narramore and Counts, this understanding of human nature explained all the evil in the world—something Rogers’s theory failed to do—while avoiding “worm theology” which they saw as psychologically unhealthy.44
Some Christian counselors did agree with the secular antipsychiatry movement about the etiology of mental illness and, like Glasser and Mowrer, drew a direct line from sin to mental illness. Adams made this argument most forcefully, drawing examples from the time he spent working with Mowrer at Illinois. In chapter 3 of Competent to Counsel, Adams argued that, with the exception of “organically generated difficulties,” there was no mental illness, only sin and an unwillingness to face and confess that sin.45 To illustrate his point, he recounted the apparently remarkable effect of confronting mentally ill people and requiring them to tell the truth about what was bothering them. Adams gave the example of “Mary,” who would begin to scream and cry in therapy sessions when progress appeared imminent and who had been diagnosed as manic-depressive. When her counselors ignored her tantrums and confronted her, telling her that they knew she was hiding something, she immediately quieted; and eventually she revealed her secret—an adulterous affair with a neighbor. “Steve” was a young man from a local college whose diagnosis was catatonic schizophrenia and who was uncommunicative and unresponsive. His counselors treated him as if he understood every word they were saying to him, and he very shortly began to respond. In time, he admitted that he had feigned illness in order to avoid taking responsibility for having failed all of his university classes because he had spent too much time working on the school play.46 In his stories, Adams portrayed mentally ill people as impostors, not suffering emotional distress caused by unconfessed sin but fabricating emotional distress to cover up sin. He generally agreed with Mowrer’s claims about the importance of facing, confessing, and making restitution for sin, but he disassociated himself from Mowrer because of Mowrer’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of a transcendent God and of biblically based standards for moral behavior. Mowrer argued that moral standards derived from doing what was best for the most people, which Adams condemned as “subjectivism.”47
For Christian counselors who saw a direct causal link between sin and mental illness, counseling could not proceed without first securing the salvation of the counselee. LaHaye, Adams, and Clyde Narramore made this point explicitly, arguing that counselors who began by addressing the salvation of the counselee would see miraculous results.48 They understood the link between sin and healing in a manner roughly similar to Mowrer’s and Glasser’s. Unlike Mowrer and Glasser, however, the Christian counselors believed that healing came from God, not from the acts of confession and restitution.
Tim LaHaye described a successful counseling encounter with a young man who came to him angry and disgusted with his wife, who was under psychiatric care and was, in the husband’s description, “psychotic” and nearly impossible to live with. LaHaye, working from the principle that no real help could be offered to the young man unless he had accepted Christ, began by outlining the plan of salvation using a Campus Crusade for Christ tract called the Four Spiritual Laws that LaHaye’s sixteen-year-old daughter had been given at a training conference for that organization. The results, according to LaHaye, were nothing short of miraculous. The young man, after first claiming that he did not believe in Jesus, agreed to invite Jesus Christ into his life. Having done so, he wept. Then, although he had earlier spent an hour detailing all of his wife’s weaknesses, he told LaHaye that he now realized it was not, after all, his wife’s fault, but that the problem was him. According to LaHaye, two months later the young man’s wife became a Christian and no longer needed psychiatric care.
The kinds of assumptions LaHaye and Adams made were also implicit in the work of Tweedie, Collins, and even Clyde Narramore’s nephew Bruce, but these latter counselors were unwilling to argue that the starting point for all counseling was salvation. They were no less convinced of the power of God and the necessity of the Holy Spirit to change lives, but they did not as a consequence believe that all mental illness was caused by sin. For instance, Gary Collins took a significantly different view of the etiology of mental illness in his book, Search for Reality (1969). Vernon Grounds, in the foreword to the book, praised Collins, in what sounded like a tacit rebuke of LaHaye and Adams, for his refusal “to endorse the uncritical, streamlined explanations which are prevalent in some Biblically-oriented circles—e.g., all emotional disturbance is attributable to an individual’s sin; psychology and Christianity are irreconcilable enemies; every valid answer to personality needs and problems is found only in the Word of God.”49
Collins was every bit as biblical in his approach as was Adams, even laying out his commitment to biblical inerrancy early in the book.50 He began his chapter titled “Why Do Christians Crack Up?” by acknowledging that the cause of mental illness (or “abnormality”) could be in some counselees “strictly spiritual.”51 He also asserted that mental illness could be a problem, temptation, or trial “permitted” by God to build virtues such as patience or humility. In a turn of argument that sounded very much like Anton Boisen’s arguments about the morally sensitive individual (and Collins cited Boisen when defining abnormality), Collins pointed out that many Christians might appear abnormal by the standards of society or secular psychology. He cited sexual behavior in particular, saying, “A sex-obsessed and pleasure loving society has no place for a philosophy which says we should not make provision for the flesh to fulfill the lust thereof.”52 Drawing on Erich Fromm’s work, Collins argued that in a sick society people could potentially share the same pathology.53 Finally, Collins suggested two other possible causes of mental illness, ones that were more familiar to the secular psychologist. First, something might have happened in the individual’s childhood to cause mental illness later in life, and, second, the illness might be the result of a “physical malfunctioning.”54
Because of what he believed about the etiology of mental illness—that some mental illness did not have a spiritual cause—Collins did not assume that an individual had to be “saved” first before he or she could receive any effective psychological help. At the same time, he wanted to be clear that Christianity did offer the possibility of a life of “peace and power” that was “superior to every alternative.” And while, unlike Adams and LaHaye, he did not claim that Christian belief was the only path to emotional health and stability, he did insist that individuals who wanted a particular kind of help—that superhuman wisdom and divine strength that came from God—did need to be saved before they could receive it.55
For the most conservative of the Christian counselors, like LaHaye, Adams, and Clyde Narramore, the counselor’s obligation did not stop with salvation. An ongoing transformation of the counselee’s life was necessary. In fact, this was what they regarded as the real work of Christian counseling—helping the counselee to identify and confess sin and then develop spiritual practices meant to allow the Holy Spirit to work. LaHaye called this the Spirit-filled temperament, and Adams referred to the process as sanctification, describing it as a “growth away from sin and toward righteousness” in which individuals were “transformed into the likeness of Christ.”56 LaHaye delineated the characteristics of the Spirit-filled temperament and then the steps to be taken to achieve it, which included self-examination, confession of all known sin, complete submission to God, a specific request to be filled with the Spirit, and an affirmation of belief by the individual that he or she had become filled with the Spirit. LaHaye cautioned against expecting a feeling or an ecstatic experience, and he distinguished between being filled by the Spirit and walking or “abiding” in the Spirit. The latter involved guarding against grieving the Spirit, repeating the five steps to being filled—multiple times daily if necessary—and pursuing a plan of regular Bible reading, daily prayer, and yielding to the Spirit, witnessing, as well as making walking in the Spirit a “habit.”57
Jay Adams identified a similar process when he described sanctification, contending that the Holy Spirit transformed lives through “the ministry of the Word, the sacraments, prayer, and the fellowship of God’s people.” Given the power of the Holy Spirit, Adams wondered, “How can counseling that is removed from the means of grace expect to effect the permanent changes that come only by growth in grace?”58 In any case, in the same way that salvation was only possible through the power of God, so was the transformed life accomplished only through the power of the Holy Spirit. In this way of thinking, spiritual health and mental health were intimately linked and were sustained by daily confessing of sin and living a life in the Spirit.
Clyde Narramore also advocated a plan of spiritual growth and formation for Christians as a shield against mental illness and as a support of mental health. Narramore argued that, for a “great majority” of Christians, their problems were spiritual and stemmed from “not letting Christ control their actions.” As an example, he pointed to the case of a woman who was grieving so severely over the loss of her only son that she considered suicide. Narramore observed that the woman had allowed her life to be centered on her son rather than on Christ. Her counselor, Narramore explained, focused on the woman’s spiritual state, and shortly after she rededicated her life to Christ “completely,” she began to recover her “mental and emotional well-being.”59 Narramore’s plan for keeping Christ at the center of the individual’s life and thus encouraging mental health involved steps similar to those advocated by LaHaye and Adams; they included daily prayer, daily Bible reading, regular church attendance, witnessing and personal testimony, and reading devotional “Christcentered” books.60
In this approach to the attainment and sustenance of mental health, confession was the centerpiece, both at the point of salvation and as part of the ongoing transformation. Confession was important both for its palliative effect and for its redemptive effect. It required, however, more than speaking aloud one’s sin. It also required repentance. Adams turned to the Bible for his thesis on confession, using a verse from Proverbs: “He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper: but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.”61 Adams elaborated, highlighting the importance of both confessing and forsaking sin in order to enjoy relief and pardon. He pointed to the Epistle of James to make the case that physical suffering could be caused by unconfessed sin and that for this reason the church had a particular role in healing. But Adams was careful to also point out that one did not confess just to be healed. Later in the same chapter he described “true confession” as “repentance before God,” declaring, “It can never be but a technique by which one may obtain relief from his misery or ‘makeup’ with another.” That is, the ultimate goal was not the relief of suffering or even the restoration of relationships; it was the individual’s being right with God and admitting to God that he or she had violated God’s principles.62
In this we hear echoes of the prewar liberal moral sensibility. On one level, some of the Christian counselors’ assumptions did not differ that much from those of Charles Holman, who had recommended daily devotional practices as an aid to good mental hygiene, or John Sutherland Bonnell, who had described in vivid detail the power of confession. On another level, it was a whole new animal, or rather, an animal revived from the nineteenth century and refurbished for the twentieth century. Earlier liberal ideas about the connection between sin and emotional distress were based on an assumption of fundamental human goodness and a belief that earnest moral striving would pay dividends. While repentance and redemption may have been implicitly accepted in the liberal moral sensibility, they were rarely taken up as central issues. They were assumed, rather than made explicit.
In the conservative moral sensibility, moral striving and outward manifestations of good or moral behavior were meaningless unless one also assumed God’s power to transform and the individual’s helplessness to change him-or herself. LaHaye specifically asserted that one of the causes of depression was “hypocrisy,” one example of which was attempting to change oneself without the help of the Holy Spirit.63 Jay Adams went a step further, arguing that attempting to achieve change without the Spirit was a “rebellion against God,” because it assumed human autonomy and undercut the need for grace by assuming that human beings were fundamentally good, and it resulted in “a legalistic works-righteousness that will lead ultimately to despair since it divests itself of the life and power of the spirit.”64 Works by evangelical counselors conveyed a sense of the overmastering power of God that pastoral counselors did not have or did not express.
Not all Christian counselors placed such an emphasis on the absolute power of God in contrast to the absolute helplessness of human beings. Many of the same themes persisted but were espoused less rigidly. Again, Gary Collins’s work is a good example. Collins invoked the Holy Spirit almost as often as Adams or LaHaye but not with the same detail and specificity. He did not prescribe exactly how to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Instead, as part of his discussion of how religious belief, and especially Christian beliefs, offered a healthy way to deal with problems, he quoted extensively from scripture, highlighting passages that illustrated the role of the Holy Spirit in encouraging, comforting, and teaching the believer. Collins framed the Christian life as one that involved a personal relationship with Jesus, the necessity of growth in that relationship, and the likelihood of both hardship and “supernatural power” to meet that hardship. Collins did not use the word “sanctification,” but he was describing a process similar to the one outlined by LaHaye and Adams and was claiming that this was the road taken by the psychologically sound and emotionally healthy individual.65 At the very end of his book Search for Reality, Collins again reaffirmed his commitment to a biblical and spiritual approach to psychology, commenting, “It must always be remembered that psychology is a tool of the church. It is the Holy Spirit who convicts men of sin. The Holy Spirit and the Bible teach men and enable them to grow spiritually. In His work the Holy Spirit can and does use tools. Modern psychology might be one of these tools. If evangelicals carefully avoid over dependence on psychology, this exciting science of behavior can be a valuable aid both in our understanding of each other and in the work to which we have been called by God.”66 So, while the level of detail varied, the fundamental principles were consistent throughout the evangelical counseling literature of the period.
The conservative moral sensibility, with its ideas about the depth of human sinfulness and the power of God, also had a much more clearly defined sense of sin and a clearer sense of what needed to be done in order for a person to be delivered from that sin than did the liberal moral sensibility. Sin came from refusing to yield control of one’s life to Jesus—the insistence upon keeping self on the throne. In Bible tracts, Christian psychology, revival meetings, Youth for Christ, and C. S. Lewis’s writings, as well as a host of evangelical para organizations, this message was repeated. Only the death of self, only the yielding up of control to a greater power would result in change.
The moral sensibility associated with the “Christian counseling” movement that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s incorporated a handful of principles that stand in stark contrast to the principles associated with pastoral counseling, a contrast that deepened in the years between 1965 and the turn of the twenty-first century. For Christian counselors’ beliefs about the authority of scripture, the transcendent power of God, and the sinfulness of human nature shaped their theory and practice in fundamental ways, leading them to stress the importance of adherence to objective moral standards drawn from the Bible and of recognizing the helplessness of human beings to change themselves without the intervention of God. In contrast, pastoral counselors’ emphasis on the importance of cultural context, human relatedness, and personal autonomy sound areligious. From the perspective of pastoral counselors, the views of these Christian counselors sound narrow, disrespectful of human need, and moralistic—a return to the very approach they had worked so hard to escape. Placed side by side, the two perspectives seem to having nothing to say to each other. And yet, both sets of assumptions were deeply moral and deeply Christian. It is their proponents’ inability to recognize and respect the historical legitimacy of the others’ views that has made civil discourse between them nearly impossible in recent years.
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