Primary Problems in Nouthetic and Biblical Counseling Approaches: A Guest Post by Dr. John Weaver

Host's Introduction

When we human beings experience deeply painful setbacks in life when trying to cope with and solve our problems, and when our hopes are met with disappointment, we face the challenge of letting those things either “make or break” us. To thoroughly move forward through the experience to gain true wisdom from it, we need to understand what happened to us, why it happened, and who owns responsibility for causes that may have contributed to the disappointing outcome. When those who fully intended to help us or the systems or tools used result in failure, our healing becomes so much more complicated because of those good motives.

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Foundational Concepts Towards a Christian View of Mental Health (Part II of II): Axioms, Evidence, and Discerning Truth

This might well be subtitled as

“Is all psychology atheistic and evil?”

or

“Why won't people in patriarchy listen to me?”

The last consideration I'd like to offer before John Weaver's guest post about problems with nouthetic counseling or “Biblical” counseling that tends to trace problems back to a sin cause on the part of the person in distress concerns how Christians go about discerning truth. As previous stated in the preceding post, this subject is one of great interest today because of the Southern Baptist Convention's (SBC) initiative to develop a doctrinal statement about mental health. I will again endeavor to condense some complex concepts down into some simple descriptions, though I would love to jump into elaborate discussions of them. I again beg the mercy of those with knowledge of these matters as I did in the previous post, for I have condensed them significantly for the sake of brevity.

In reading John's article, I realized again just how profound the implications of how a person arrives at truth is for those who are working through questions about mental health and care offered to those in need. In philosophy, this discussion of developing a theory of knowledge, is called “epistemology.”

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Foundational Concepts Towards a Christian View of Mental Health (Part I of II): Theories on Convergence of Spirit, Soul and Body

As stated in many previous posts on this subject, I believe that if a person suffers emotional problems because they're struggling with a sin issue and won't repent, I suspect that Biblical counseling is likely helpful. My concern is piqued, however, when sins are assumed to be the cause of symptoms that might be due to physiologic cause or due to syndromes that have strong physical elements (e.g., diabetes, nutritional deficiencies, thyroid disorders, brain dysfunction, etc.). 

Challenges like grief and forgiveness also involve a journey of growth that may take many years, during which a depression or anger phase may be very healthy and appropriate – and are not sins. Often, they are part of the healing process that result from sins committed against them. When mental health issues present themselves and are not the sequelae of problems with sin on behalf of the person experiencing them, I believe that Biblical counseling only approaches (that reject physical or clinical/functional causes or perspectives) can often do more harm than good and serve to condemn the person in distress.

Before presenting Dr. John Weaver's guest post about problems with Biblical counseling, I wanted to explore some of the reasons why certain Christian groups may prefer a Biblical counseling only approach to mental health, ideas that may help put his upcoming post into perspective. I will attempt simplify some helpful related concepts, distilling them down to the basics to broaden the understanding of why nouthetic counseling in particular makes certain assumptions about the nature of man.

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