Part One: Introduction

No event in history is ever truly isolated. People, like written texts, live within contexts. No text, utterance, or movement ever exists in the abstract, but surrounding every event and communication in the history of ideas exists several influences. Such is the case for Powlison’s original 1996 dissertation, titled Competent to Counsel?: The History of a Conservative Protestant Anti-Psychiatry Movement and for the main figure of his study, Jay Adams. Now in book form, retitled The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context, Powlison expertly chauffeur’s readers through the context and conflict over counseling jurisdiction in the 1960s through to the 1990s which birthed what is known as the Biblical Counseling Movement.

As a dissertation written primarily for practitioners in the field, Powlison documents the biblical counseling movement under the genre of anti-psychiatry with the aim of “reconfiguring psychiatric thought and practice.” He successfully portrays the movement as one more alternative to mainstream psychiatry and psychotherapy, but he makes it a point in the Preface to note, “as both the dissertation and a reading of relevant literature make clear, the biblical counseling movement has never been “anti-psychiatry” in the way the adjective tends to be heard by nonhistorians.” As both a qualified scholar-historian and insider-practitioner, Powlison clears away perhaps the greatest strawmen of the movement that persists today: neither Jay Adams nor the Biblical Counseling Movement hold the position that psychology and psychiatry are illegitimate disciplines en toto. He quotes Adams in 1975 answering questions posed by critics:

“Are you saying that psychology and psychiatry are illegitimate disciplines? Do you think that they have no place at all? 

No, you misunderstand me. It is exactly not that… My problem with them is that they refuse to stay on their own property… If [the psychiatrist] were to use his medical training to find medical solutions to the truly organic difficulties that affect attitudes and behavior, the pastor would be excited about his work.”

Furthermore, before diving into chapter one, one should note the value of Powlison’s appendices. The first appendix gives a feel for Jay Adam’s system by reading him in action with counselees. The latter three appendices are articles that were published in the Journal of Biblical Counseling and show explicitly what views Powlison held personally. In “Cure of Souls (and Modern Psycho-therapies),” he updates the movement’s history while revealing his commitments and hopes. “Crucial Issues in Contemporary Biblical Counseling” defines his assessment of Jay Adam’s model and “Biological Psychiatry” revisits and updates the discussion surrounding what constitutes “truly organic difficulties” in light of the development of psychiatry after Adams.  

(forthcoming)

Part One: The Historical Context 

Part Two: The Witness of Scripture 

Part Three: The Theological Necessity of Sola Scriptura 

Part Four: Objections and Issues

Conclusion