Counseling the Hard Cases

True Stories Illustrating the Sufficiency of God's Resources in Scripture

Stuart Scott, Heath Lambert, Stuart Scott, Heath Lambert

Biblical counselors have worked for decades to demonstrate that God’s resources in Scripture are sufficient to help people with their counseling-related problems. In Counseling the Hard Cases, editors Stuart Scott and Heath Lambert use the true stories of real patients to show how the truths of God’s Word can be released to bring help, hope, and healing into the lives of those who struggle with some of the most difficult psychiatric diagnoses.

From pastors and academics to physicians and psychiatrists, a world-class team of contributing counselors share accounts of Scripture having helped overcome bipolar, dissociative identity, and obsessive compulsive disorders, postpartum depression, panic attacks, addiction, issues from childhood sexual abuse, homosexuality, and more.

The book also shows how the graces of Christ, as revealed in the Bible, brought powerful spiritual change to the lives of such people who seemed previously burdened beyond hope by mental and emotional roadblocks.

Contributors include John Babler, Ph.D., Kevin Carson, D.Min., Laura Hendrickson, M.D., Garrett Higbee, Psy.D., Robert Jones, D.Min., Martha Peace, RN, Steve Viars, D.Min., and Dan Wickert, M.D.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Sufficiency of Scripture, the Biblical Counseling Movement, and the Purpose of This Book

Heath Lambert

This book is a collection of true accounts about real people. The men and women featured here received hope, peace, joy, and dramatic change in their lives from Jesus Christ as they met with him in the pages of his Word, the Bible. These stories recount the details of how these people came to seek biblical counseling for problems they were experiencing in their lives, how caring Christians assisted them and oriented them toward Jesus, and how they encountered the rich and transforming presence of Christ through his Word in the community of the church.

The problems recounted in these stories are not trivial. The people in the following pages struggled with some of the most difficult and complex problems that any human can encounter in this life. They struggled with pain and difficulty for weeks, months, and even years, seeking help from many sources. Our contributors engaged them in relationship, walked with them through difficulty, and watched as Jesus used the ministry of counseling to bring life, comfort, and transformation.

These counselors-turned-storytellers ministered out of the shared conviction that God has given his people adequate resources to do the work of conversational ministry. They believe that God has given his people a Savior, a Bible, and a church—all of which equip his people to tackle the kinds of problems that surface in counseling—even when those problems are extremely challenging. They believe that God equips his people to counsel the hard cases.

If you are familiar with the counseling conversations taking place among Christians over the last several decades, you know that this is an audacious assertion. The church has been engaged in an ongoing debate over the resources necessary for counseling. Most do not agree with the conviction that Christians have sufficient resources to inform counseling conversations. The contributors of our book believe, however, that God has given his church all the graces necessary to do counseling. God’s inerrant, authoritative, and sufficient Word reveals a church, calls all Christians to ministry in that church, identifies the Spirit as the empowering force for that ministry, points in the direction of prayer as the dynamic means of encountering God, and demonstrates that all these belong to Christians because of the finished work of Christ. Because of this strong disagreement over sufficiency, we want to frame the counseling context of these stories before telling them. The scenarios did not arise in a vacuum, and they must be retold in the context of the much larger Christian conversation about counseling resources. That conversation has been dominated by questions about the sufficiency of Scripture.

Counseling Debates and the Sufficiency of Scripture

Is Scripture sufficient to inform all the possible counseling situations in this fallen world? The implications of such a question are massive. If Scripture is an overflowing source of wisdom for all counseling, then the pressing task for Christians is to be busy mining the text of Scripture for an understanding of the manifold problems people experience and for the wisdom to help them. If Scripture, though valuable and useful, is ultimately inadequate as a source of wisdom for all counseling, then the urgent work is to look to the corpus of secular psychology for those truths that supply the Bible’s lack. The debate revolves around the relationship between an understanding of hard problems, the nature of counseling, the contents of Scripture, and the role of secular psychology. How we answer the question about the sufficiency of Scripture ultimately describes our understanding of the content of Scripture and defines the kind of literature counselors should use to help them in their work—whether theological or psychological in nature. Christians have disagreed about this question. The rhetoric has been bitter at times.1 Of course, all such disagreements are a result of our fallen nature and are also regrettable (Phil 2:2; 1 Pet 3:8). Yet, as unfortunate as such disagreements have been, they have revealed some honest and important issues. That is to say that when we talk about these matters, we are talking about the resources and methods we use to minister to people and whether those people are ultimately helped. Such issues are far from inconsequential.

The debate began in the late 1960s with the work of Jay Adams. By the time Adams began to write about counseling, it had been over a century since a Christian had written a book explaining how to use the Bible as the source of wisdom to help people with their counseling-related problems.2 It is not possible here to address all of the manifold factors that led to this situation.3 The point to understand is that by the middle of the twentieth century most Christians did not believe that the Bible was a book that was pointedly relevant for the kinds of conversations that happen when counseling someone with hard problems. Instead, mainline Protestant pastors began to mix their liberal theology with secular psychological principles to create what became known as “clinical pastoral care.” Later, so-called integrationists sought to do the same thing but replaced liberal theology with conservative theology. The evangelical commitments of the integration movement were an improvement. It led to less optimism and naiveté concerning the worldview commitments of secular psychologists, but the outcome was the same. Christians—whether liberal or conservative—continued to believe that the Christian counseling resources found in the Bible were weak while secular resources for counseling found in the modern psychological corpus were strong.4

By the middle of the twentieth century, the Christian effort to help people with their problems had basically become a conversation about how much and what kind of secular psychology to add to the inadequacies of Scripture to offer real help. This conversation turned into a debate with the groundbreaking ministry of Adams. His central contribution to Christian counseling was a bold and controversial claim that the task of counseling was a theological enterprise that should be primarily informed by a commitment to God’s Word. He further argued that any attempt by the discipline of psychology to address counseling-related issues must be judged according to biblical standards rather than secular ones. In his first book on counseling, Adams stated:

All concepts, terms and methods used in counseling need to be re-examined biblically. Not one thing can be accepted from the past (or the present) without biblical warrant. . . . I have been engrossed in the project of developing biblical counseling and have uncovered what I consider to be a number of important scriptural principles. It is amazing to discover how much the Bible has to say about counseling, and how fresh the biblical approach is. The complete trustworthiness of Scripture in dealing with people has been demonstrated. There have been dramatic results. . . . Not only have people’s immediate problems been resolved, but there have also been solutions to all sorts of long-term problems as well. . . . The conclusions in the book are not based upon scientific findings. My method is presuppositional. I avowedly accept the inerrant Bible as the standard of all faith and practice. The Scriptures, therefore, are the basis, and contain the criteria by which I have sought to make every judgment.5

With these words the biblical counseling movement was launched, and the debate about the sufficiency of Scripture for counseling followed hard in its wake.

Since the 1950...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction: The Sufficiency of Scripture, the Biblical Counseling Movement, and the Purpose of This Book
• Chapter 2: “Mariana” and Surviving Sexual Abuse
• Chapter 3: “Brian” and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
• Chapter 4: “Sarah” and Postpartum Depression
• Chapter 5: “Mary” and Paralyzing Fear
• Chapter 6: “Ashley” and Anorexia
• Chapter 7: “Tony” and Bipolar Disorder
• Chapter 8: “Jackie” and Dissociative Identity Disorder
• Chapter 9: “Jason” and Homosexuality
• Chapter 10: “Julie” and Addictions and Adultery
• Chapter 11: “Jennifer” and an Apparent Hard Case
• Contributors
• Name Index
• Scripture Index