Page 158 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 7

The Work and Thinking of David Benner

The current approaches to Christian counseling by respective advocates as being basically com-
are no more adequate in terms of these criteria. patible with biblical theology.
In fact, in the majority of cases they are much This leads to the question of how these approa-
less comprehensive. For example, relationship ches differ from others that are not called Chri-
counseling (Carlson, 1980) includes assumpti- stian. Is Christian psychotherapy anything more
ons only about the conditions for change, igno- than a Christian doing psychotherapy? Vander-
ring personality development, psychotherapy, ploeg (1981) argues that „there is no difference
and goals of therapy. Similarly growth coun- between Christian and non-Christian therapy.
seling (Clinebell, 1979), love therapy (Morris, The goals are the same, … the means are the
1974), and integrity therapy (Drakeford, 1967) same. … The difference lies not within therapy
all give only very minimal treatment to the pro- but within the therapists themselves. One group
cesses of normal or abnormal personality deve- is Christian and the other is not” (p. 303). Those
lopment, focusing on goals and techniques of who have disagreed with this position and have
therapy. Only biblical counseling as developed argued for an approach to psychotherapy that
by Crabb (1977) explicitly sets forth a model is uniquely Christian have usually done so on
of personality development and psychopa- the basis of either uniqueness in theory or uni-
thology and then relates goals and techniques queness in role and/or task. These two major
of therapy to this foundation. In this regard it arguments will be considered separately.
stands as probably the most comprehensive of
the existing Christian approaches. However, in The Bible and Personality Theory
comparison to psychoanalysis, client-centered For a number of authors the answer to the que-
(person-centered) therapy, or behavior therapy, stion of what makes a particular approach to
it still must be seen as simplistic and far from a counseling Christian has been quite simple and
comprehensive model. direct. They assert that Christian counseling is
To be fair, however, it is important to realize that based on the biblical model of personality. In
it was probably not the intention of these au- other words, they assume that Scripture con-
thors to present their ideas as a comprehensive tains a unique anthropology and theory of psy-
system of counseling but rather as an approach chotherapy. Adams (1977) argues that the Bible
to counseling. For example, Carlson (1980) sta- is the only textbook needed for the Christian to
tes that his intent is to present a style of counse- learn all that is needed for counseling. He as-
ling that is based on Jesus’ style of relating. He serts that „if a principle is new to or different
goes on to assert that „there is no recognized set from those that are advocated in Scriptures, it
of techniques that are exclusively Christian” (p. is wrong; if it is not, it is unnecessary” (p. 183).
32) and that there is „no agreed-upon focus of Others (Carter, 1980; Crabb, 1977) have avo-
change” (p. 33). His focus, therefore, is on a sty- ided the assumption that nothing useful can be
le of relating, which he feels is the point where learned about counseling apart from the Scrip-
a counselor or therapist is most able to be expli- tures but have retained the expectation that
citly Christian. Scripture does contain a unique personality
There is one additional point that should be no- theory and implicit model of counseling. The
ted in evaluating existing Christian approaches striking thing, however, is that seldom do these
to counseling. With the exception of biblical people agree as to just what Scripture suggests
counseling and nouthetic counseling none of to be this unique model. This is reminiscent of
the other approaches have been explicitly deve- Berkouwer’s (1962) assertion that the failures
loped from Christian theology. Rather, they are to find a system of personality or psychology in
adapted forms of existing secular theories which Scripture “have only made clear that because of
the authors argue are consistent with Christian the great variety of concepts used in the Bib-
truth. Thus, we find transactional analysis (Ma- le, it is not possible to synthesize them into a
lony, 1980), reality therapy (Morris, 1974), and systematic Biblical anthropology in which the
family systems therapy (Larsen, 1980) at the ba- structure and composition of man would be
sis of approaches to therapy which are argued made clear. ... It is obviously not the intention of

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