Analyzing the Biblical Counseling Debate Tactics: On Rice Lecture Series - Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary

I don't understand why biblical counseling needs to make this a binary answer. Scripture is sufficient in all things that it touches. But Scripture has its limitations. It doesn't indicate how to change the oil in your car. It doesn't tell you to treat cancer. Biblical counseling needs to get off of its high horse, and realize that it sits alongside other practices. Practices that need to also sit alongside Scripture if we are to use them correctly. We would never tell someone who is diagnosed with cancer to not seek medical help. At the same time, that we are encouraging a congregant to seek the right kind of medical help with their cancer, we would also encourage them to seek counseling to address those aspects that medicine does not touch, such as the feeling of a loss of control. We would encourage them that while cancer has a physical root, it is the spiritual aspects that help us understand how to live with it and how to act faithfully through it. Is there Scriptural basis around the spiritual and physical aspects of dealing with something like a mental condition? Yes. After Elijah dealt with the prophets of Baal he sat up in the wilderness and articulated deep suicidal thoughts. When God met him in that moment, He did not scold Elijah. He did not address Elijah as He did Job, asking him to stand and answer before God with his thoughts. In fact, He said absolutely nothing. Instead He offered Elijah a physical respite. He knew that the issue was not in Elijah's faith or his lack of understanding God. He knew there was a physical component. He needed to eat and get some rest. Something that modern psychology says is one of the biggest contributors to changing a mental mindset. There is much in psychology that is bad. That needs to be evaluated against Scripture. But there are also many things. mentally, that are grounded within the physical realm of the brain. Grounding techniques, EMR and other elements are effective at combating things like PTSD, which has distinct physical components. At the same time, things like PTSD, while not solved through biblical counseling, needs to be part of a more holistic biblical approach.

Apparently there was a debate, which I have not seen. There might be a recording if you sign up for it: https://dbts.edu/rice/

The Substack piece by Leroy Hill seems on track to me…

The question neither answered — and the question the biblical counseling movement most urgently needs answered — is this:

By what principled, repeatable, worldview-grounded process does a counselor evaluate any extra-biblical knowledge claim, determine what it is actually observing versus what it is interpreting, filter it through a biblical framework, and arrive at a defensible conclusion about what can inform faithful care and what must be rejected?

That process was absent from the debate platform. Its absence is what the nine out of ten finding in current biblical counseling research confirms: even the movement’s most experienced and thoughtful practitioners have no consistent framework for navigating this question. The debate did not produce one. It demonstrated why one is needed.

Whether the debate “did not produce one” or not, I don’t know, but Hill is right about what we all need. This is the question of how biblical sufficiency works at the boundary of what it talks about and what it does not talk about and what we’re to do with human learning that is on the other side of that boundary. Bearing in mind that human learning is “learning by sinners” but also “learning by beings made in the image of God.” So we don’t get to be broadly dismissive.

The debate is on the DBTS podcast for those interested. It is long but informative.