A recent class period generated particularly good discussion and several students mentioned afterward how much they enjoyed it. I’ve decided to post a summary of that discussion here for a wider audience. I’m going to encourage my students to come and participate in further dialogue, but would appreciate anyone else’s input as well.In one of our texts, Larry Crabb addresses the issue of Biblical sufficiency in counseling. At the heart of the debate among Christians is this question: Is the Bible sufficient to tell us everything we need to know about understanding and solving the problems people face in their lives?
Rephrased for counselors, the question might go something like this: Is the Bible a textbook for counseling? Crabb outlines three positions on this question.
(1) No, God never intended to write a comprehensive guide for counseling. Under this position, “Content other than biblical data is permitted to serve as the beginning and end points for thinking through the issues of counseling.” Counselors legitimately can use any data in understanding and solving personal problems as long as they don’t contradict direct teachings of Scripture. One major problem with this position is that the Bible often fails to serve as a foundation for our counseling. Our theories and techniques must only avoid conflict with the Bible. They do not necessarily emerge from the Bible.
Sometimes our churches operate under this position even though they would verbalize something different. Churches that verbally commit to the Bible being sufficient for everything needed in understanding and solving personal problems often openly neglect addressing personal problems. Crabb puts it this way, “The message [in many churches] is clear: The community of God’s people is no place to deal with the real concerns eating away at your lives; we exist to maintain orthodox belief and to promote conforming behavior. Helping you with your personal problems is not the business of the church.”
(2) Yes. It is comprehensively relevant to every legitimate question that life presents. Under this position, if the Bible does not answer a question about life, then the question should not need to be asked. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? Crabb agrees with much of this position, but in the end says, “The problem with this reasoning… is that it is so close to being right.” He offers two reservations about this position.
Reservation #1: If we are looking for direct answers, we might give to the literal meaning of the text a comprehensive relevance that it simply does not have. Imagine we are called to counsel a man struggling with intense urges to cross dress. Since the Bible directly address this issue (in Dueteronomy 22:5) we might assume that this teaching is comprehensively relevant. Nothing else is needed. We would counsel the man, “Don’t do that.” If he asks why he struggles with such urges when most other men don’t, or if he asks what causes such urges, we would advise him that those questions are illegitimate. They aren’t answered in the Bible, so those questions must not matter. Crabb explains, “Under the banner of biblical sufficiency, Christian counselors may ignore crucially important questions by responding only to questions that they can easily answer.”
Reservation #2: When the range of permissible questions is narrowed, our understanding of complicated problems is too simplistic. Imagine this time we are counseling a woman struggling with anorexia. Since the Bible doesn’t directly answer this issue, we turn to issues the Bible does answer. We know that the Bible describes our bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit. Anorexia may then just be seen as rebellion against her responsibility to care properly for the temple. Again, “why” questions go unanswered and we give shallow answers to complicated problems. “When we limit the questions we are allowed to ask to those the Bible specifically answers, the result will often be a nonthinking and simplistic understanding of life and its problems that fails to drive us to increased dependency in the Lord.”
For Crabb, there must be a third alternative. We’ll be discussing that in class today and I’ll be posting a summary of it here tomorrow.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment