Biblical Counseling Movement by David Powlison

Summary Primary Goal The purpose of David Powlison’s Biblical Counseling Movement is to provide readers with a history of the approach and then to provide readers with Powlison’s own perspective on what works and why. The aim of the book is to provide context about the nature of Biblical counseling, how it has been used throughout history, and then to make rational, common sense assessments about how it can be applied in one’s own life and career.

Thus, the primary goal of the book is to give the reader context and the ability to implement the acquired knowledge in practice. Development of Problems and Personal Need The issues came about when Jay Adams reasoned that modern psychology was really just “bad theology” as Powlison puts it.

There was a personal need among patients and providers who knew better to provide a Biblical counseling approach that could truly address the needs of the modern patient from a spiritual and theological point of view rather than from a materialistic atheistic perspective. Biblical Integration The Bible is a big part of this method because, as the author states, he accepts the Word of God as the truth and views Scripture as the message that man most needs to hear.

There is nothing in the Bible that cannot help in counseling, and so it serves as the perfect foundation for counseling. Formula for Change The formula for change that Powlison recommends is to learn from those who came before, take what works or use the good that the achieved and be directed by that influence.

The formula for change for the patient is basically to use the Bible as the source of experience and teaching so that any issues or questions the client has can be answered by turning to the Word of God in the Bible. Balance of Theology and Spirituality There is a clear balance of theology and spirituality in the work, just as there is a balance of both in Scripture.

The point that Powlison makes is that Biblical counseling comes from multiple perspectives—it comes from the perspective of the counselor and from the perspective of the person being counseled. There is no one single way to look at it. Instead, it can be made sense of from a variety of positions, just as the contextualization of the history of Biblical counseling reveals.

The important thing is to be fully integrated into it, to accept the process, and to commit to what God is teaching and revealing about Himself and about what people need to do to reach him and to be happy with Him. Those latter two words need to be emphasized because they really get to the heart of what is important in Biblical counseling. Human Personality The focus on human personality is such that it is defined within the confines of God, sin and misery as is shown in chapter 5.

Powlison looks at the system employed by Adams and how it impacted his clientele: the framework is the framework of God and sin—on the one hand is the Supreme Being, the source of all that is good—and on the other is the cause of all man’s unhappiness, his pride, his self-interest. It is through the choosing of one or the other that Powlison depicts Adams’ approach to Biblical counseling and how it was used to treat clients.

The human personality, however, is so complex that it can actually be trying to move in two directions at once—towards God and towards sin at the same time. This produces its own kind of misery and unhappiness and prompts the personality to be split. This is essentially what is shown by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. Powlison depicts this split in the sense that it occurs when the client cannot decide which way he will go.

There is thus a need for the client to be supported in this process, to have people who can help provide a supportive embrace as the individual person attempts to overcome personal hurdles and roadblocks between him and God. Counselor’s Function and Role The counselor’s function and role depends, Powlison shows, on the orientation of the counselor. Throughout history there have been different approaches, perceived functions and roles. It is not something that has been explicitly defined.

Yet Powlison goes into it in more detail in his appendices as he attempts to show what has worked for him and how the approach might be applied by a counselor. The key to the approach Powlison shows is that the modern psychologist has to be aware of the soul—not just the mind or the body. The soul is the part that is of God.

The soul is where God’s grace goes to transform the body and the mind and the behavior and the orientation of the person. The soul has to be considered. If the person is living in sin, the soul is not going to be in a good state. If the soul is struggling upwards towards God then there is bound to be some grace and light and life in the soul.

The counselor’s function is to be mindful of this and to offer Biblical support along the way. Major Contribution to Counseling The major contribution to counseling that this theory makes is that it helps to shine a light on the need to focus on the soul in counseling, even if people are not aware of the soul as a matter of any significance. They need to be educated, just as Christ educated people about sin.

He showed that forgiving one’s enemies was a real challenge for most people yet this was something that had to be done in order to be of God and in order to be with God. To love one’s neighbor was considered a radical concept, even though the Jews had been taught this idea in their history. Yet it was not until Christ came and personified this notion that they truly began to see what exactly it was that was expected of them.

Christ healed souls not just bodies, and that is the point that Powlison makes: the Biblical counseling approach has to focus on the soul because this is where the real life of the person exists. Limitations of this Counseling Theory The limitations of the counseling theory are that it will be difficult for it to be applied in the modern world because so many people have adopted the atheistic point of view.

They do not want to think that they have a soul or that it matters whether they sin or not. Convincing people of the reality of the soul can be quite difficult especially in these sensitive PC times. Classification This work could be classified as Biblical, Christian psychology in its approach. It is rooted in the idea that Biblical counseling is a real thing and needs to be appreciated. It focuses on how that approach can be implemented with best results.

Practical Application Influence upon My Life This material relates to the utility for the overall discipline of counseling and the specific potential influence upon my life and ministry in the sense that it shows how important it is to think of the human person in the right way. It is not sufficient to think of man as a being who can be treated merely by probing around in his mind and finding out what happened to him in his childhood and talking about the trauma there.

No, it has to do more. It has to look at the soul. It has to go into the place where the life of.