Sin and Grace in Christian Counseling

An Integrative Paradigm

Mark R. McMinn

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780830879045
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Sin. Grace. Christian Counseling. How do these fit together? In Christian theology sin and grace are intrinsically interconnected. Teacher and counselor Mark McMinn believes that Christian counseling, then, must also take account of both human sin and God's grace. For both sin and grace are distorted whenever one is emphasized without the other. McMinn, noting his own tendencies and the temptation to stereotype different Christian approaches to counseling along this theological divide, aims to help all those preparing for or currently serving in the helping professions. Expounding the proper relationship of sin and grace, McMinn shows how the full truth of the Christian gospel works itself out in the functional, structural and relational domains of an integrative model of psychotherapy.Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) Books explore how Christianity relates to mental health and behavioral sciences including psychology, counseling, social work, and marriage and family therapy in order to equip Christian clinicians to support the well-being of their clients.

1

Divided by Sin

SOMETIMES THE CLEAREST DIVISIONS IN LIFE do not hold up well under scrutiny. In my case, I once divided Christian counseling into two distinct categories: the biblical counselors and the integrationists. On one hand, biblical counselors were – more or less – the bad guys. Trained in conservative seminaries and influenced by writers like Jay Adams, they had one goal in therapy: to root out sin in their clients’ lives. They did not know much about psychology, and they seemed insensitive to relational aspects of counseling. I, on the other hand, was a good guy – an integrationist. Trained as a clinical psychologist at a reputable university, I understood a good deal about psychology and still affirmed the importance of theological orthodoxy. My approach to psychotherapy, I thought, was more sophisticated and nuanced than the biblical counselors’. The division was clear in my mind: they emphasized sin, I emphasized grace.

Philip Monroe messed up my tidy categorization of Christian counseling. Phil and I first met in my office at Wheaton College when I was interviewing him for the doctoral program in clinical psychology that I was directing at the time. Phil was an unusual candidate because he was coming from the “other side.” Trained at Westminster Seminary in biblical counseling, he wanted a graduate degree in psychology also. Before the interview, I was expecting not to recommend him for admission; after all, he was one of them. But to my surprise, I found him a delightful, engaging, compassionate man. I was drawn to his love of theology and people. We accepted Phil into our program, and he came and studied at Wheaton College for five years. I suspect I learned at least as much from Phil during that half-decade as he learned from me. He helped me get beyond my caricatures and misunderstandings of biblical counseling and helped me to see the importance of a theological perspective on counseling. While in our graduate program, Phil wrote an article in Journal of Psychology and Theology about building bridges between biblical counselors and Christian psychologists (Monroe, 1997). Now he is a licensed psychologist teaching at Biblical Seminary where he is still building bridges. Though my audience for this book is mostly intended for those in the integrationist tradition, I hope it helps build some bridges also.

Seemingly, the doctrine of sin has become a watershed among Christian counselors. On one side of the divide are the many seminarians, pastors and biblical counselors who identify themselves with biblical counseling (Powlison, 2000, 2001) or nouthetic counseling (Adams, 1970). On the other side, many pastoral counselors, Christian psychologists, social workers and psychotherapists prefer to emphasize the integration of faith and the behavioral sciences. The dividing line has been drawn, and loyalties run deep. Counselors in one group attend conferences of the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (www.ccef.org) and subscribe to The Journal of Biblical Counseling. Counselors in the other group attend the Christian Association for Psychological Studies (www.caps.net) and subscribe to The Journal of Psychology and Christianity. Educational institutions have joined one side or the other – some offering degrees in biblical counseling and others degrees in Christian counseling or clinical psychology. Churches have entered the fray. Some embrace contemporary psychological methods; others insist that all psychology must be rejected. And many practitioners first identify what they do not believe (I am not a biblical counselor, or I am not an integrationist) even before they identify what they do believe. But could it be that these divisions over the doctrine of sin reflect some deeper divide about the nature of what it means to be human and how we relate to a God who longs to draw us close in loving relationship?

If the watershed is about the doctrines of sin and grace – with some Christian counselors emphasizing sin while others emphasize grace – then it is not surprising that most choose grace. Shall I emphasize sin with my clients, causing them to slink further into shame and remorse for their struggles and perhaps take on unnecessary guilt for events over which they have no control? Or shall I emphasize grace, accepting my clients as Christ has accepted me, allowing them to grow into awareness of their strengths and weaknesses? Stated this way, the choice is clear. Who wouldn’t choose grace?

But maybe the matter is not so simple. Dividing the Christian counseling world into a sin camp and a grace camp is misleading and incorrect. I suggest this for two reasons. First, the biblical counseling movement is not primarily about sin. The critics of the movement reduce biblical counselors to counselors who hold naive and simplistic views of sin, often without even reading their work. More accurately, the biblical counseling movement is primarily about Christian anthropology and ecclesiology. They are trying to reclaim a Christian view of health and functioning that keeps the care of souls within the ministries and teachings of the church. The doctrine of sin is a key Christian teaching, of course, so it is one of several tenets emphasized by biblical counselors. Psychology is viewed skeptically by biblical counselors because it has removed the care of souls from the ministry of the church, and because it has supplanted a Christian view of persons with a subtle and pernicious tug toward a secular view of human functioning. Dividing the Christian counseling world into a sin camp and a grace camp, and then associating biblical counselors with the sin camp, does terrible injustice to what they are saying.

COUNSELING TIP 1.1: The Confirmation Bias Affects Counselors Too

Cognitive psychologists write about the confirmation bias, which means that people seek out information consistent with what they already believe and avoid contrary information. Consider how this might work for Mandy, a newly graduated Christian psychologist or counselor who has heard negative things about the biblical counseling movement. Rather than reading what biblical counselors are actually saying, Mandy might be content to read those who criticize biblical counseling. She will be confirming what she already believes, which helps her simplify the world and make sense of her counseling methods. But notice that she may also be quite wrong because she has never read the Journal of Biblical Counseling or a book by a convinced biblical counselor. She might become a much better Christian counselor after reading some of the biblical counseling materials. Even if she disagrees sharply with what the biblical counselors have to say, at least she will be in a position to consider perspectives that she had not considered before.

Second, it is not helpful to divide Christian counselors according to sin and grace because it distorts Christian doctrine. Sin and grace may warrant separate chapters in a systematic theology text, because both are huge concepts and we must divide books into chapters somehow, but the concepts are so deeply and thoroughly interconnected that one cannot possibly be understood without the other; grace cannot be understood without understanding the extent of our sin, and we must have the hope of grace in order to look honestly at the depth of our sin. When Christian counselors attempt to emphasize sin without grace, or grace without sin, they distort both.

The Lost Language of Sin and Grace

There was once a time when the language of sin and grace was understood, both in private and public discourse, but that era has largely been supplanted by a therapeutic culture that emphasizes symptoms more than sin and unconditional acceptance more than grace. The language of sin has been replaced with a language of crime and sickness (Menninger, 1973; Taylor, 2000). One leading psychologist even suggested that the belief in sin is what makes people disturbed (Ellis, 1960, 1971), though he has recently recanted this belief (Ellis, 2000).

I sometimes read Puritan prayers to my students, and then we pause to ponder what sort of response such a prayer might engender in churches today. For example, consider these two phrases from separate prayers:

It is fitting thou shouldest not regard me,

for I am vile and selfish;

yet I seek thee,

and when I find thee there is no wrath

to devour me,

but only sweet love. (Bennett, 1975, p. 46)

No poor creature stands in need of divine grace more than I do,

And yet none abuses it more than I have done, and still do.

How heartless and dull I am!

Humble me in the dust for not loving thee more.

Every time I exercise any grace renewedly

I am renewedly indebted to thee,

the God of all grace, for special assistance. (Bennett, 1975, p. 111)

Imagine how public prayers such as these might be perceived today. The person offering such a prayer might be prescribed a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (e.g., Prozac), sent to a pastoral counselor or referred to a self-esteem group. The language of sin seems quaint, a relic of some old-time religion, and though the word grace has persisted, it cannot possibly mean the same thing as it did before we lost track of sin.

Today we use grace as a synonym for being lenient or tolerant: “I will show some grace and accept late papers,” or “You have a ten-day grace period by which to make your mortgage payment.” This is a shallow, vapid, consumerist sort of grace compared to what was known in previous generations when people went trembling into the confessional booth and emerged with the lightness of step that comes with forgiveness of sin.

The Puritan prayers may seem harsh or old-fashioned, but they remind us of how far sin separates us from God and how desperately we need a solution so that we can be ushered back into relationship with God – a God who has demonstrated a passionate and holy love for humanity from the Garden of Eden until today. The doctrines of sin and grace are ultimately our great hope because they reverberate with some primordial rhythm in the human soul, giving us the courage to believe in a God who is restoring and redeeming all creation.

In his book Whatever Became of Sin? Karl Menninger, a distinguished twentieth-century psychiatrist, describes his eyewitness account of how sin disappeared. “When I was a boy, sin was still a serious matter and the word was not a jocular term. But I saw this change; I saw it go. I am afraid I even joined in hailing its going” (Menninger, 1973, p. 24). Menninger goes on to describe a new social morality, which was introduced with contemporary mental health research and practice; psychiatrists and psychologists became the high priests of this new moral order. While Menninger affirms the importance of mental health professions, he regrets that the concept of sin did not survive the transition. I would add that a true understanding of grace has also been lost, because it cannot exist without a language of sin.

And now we can see what the biblical counselors are saying. They are not saying we should call our clients sinners and demand repentance in the counseling office as much as they are calling us back to a way of thinking that is easily lost in today’s flurry of mental health activity. A theological worldview has been supplanted by a therapeutic paradigm as one vocabulary has been traded in for another. In the process we may have lost our understanding of what it means to be fallen humans in God’s world.

Jennifer was a bright young woman, newly married, trying desperately to recover from that awful Wednesday evening. Finances were tight, as they often are for newlyweds, so Jennifer took a job at the local convenience store. She stepped away from the counter one evening to get something from the back room when she realized that a customer had followed her. The next moments were a horrifying haze of knife-point threats, partial disrobing, the foul stench of unwanted closeness and, ultimately, forced sexual penetration. When the rapist was satisfied, he holstered his knife and walked out the front door as if he had bought a pack of chewing gum or cigarettes. Meanwhile Jennifer lay sobbing beside cases of beer in the back room, forever changed.

In our counseling, Jennifer and I needed the language of sin. She needed a word like sin to understand what had happened. How else could such horror be understood? Her perpetrator had not merely made a mistake. This was not just a bad choice. His behavior was not merely a symptom of some psychological disorder. This was horrendous sin, and it needed to be named and grieved, over and over. We needed the language of sin to exonerate her. This was not her doing. It was not her sin. She was targeted, stalked and devastated by the sin of another. And she needed a caring, gentle listener to help her walk back into memories of the trauma, to help her weep and lament and try to make sense of her future.

This may seem like an easy clinical example because it identifies a sin done to the client rather than by the client. Who wouldn’t view rape as a horrendous offense worthy of the label of sin? But what does a Christian counselor do when a client is struggling with a personal pattern of sin? Here again, the temptation is to bifurcate the world into two artificial categories – those who are sinned against and those who are sinning themselves. As I will explore further in chapter two, this is a misleading and simplistic view of sin. Even in Jennifer’s case, where the source of the problem was so clearly a sin against her, she found it had devastating implications in her own personal choices thereafter.

Events like rape change people. In the months following, Jennifer found herself irritable, aloof and annoyed easily by her husband. She screamed out in rage and anxiety, but the rapist who caused her pain was not there to hear, so her feelings spilled over onto undeserving loved ones. Her relationships became strained, her emotions frazzled, her hope compromised.

Here we see the complexity of sin. It is not merely packaged inside the skin of a single human being. We are social beings, constantly interacting with one another, always being influenced by the sin of the world around us. Jennifer had been violated, and though she had no culpability for this tragic rape, the rape cost her so dearly that it submerged her into a pattern of sinful and damaging interactions with family members. With time and ample doses of grace from God, caring friends, family members and her therapist, Jennifer was able to grieve her loss, recover the majority of her hope, renew strained relationships and move ahead with life.

IN THE OFFICE 1.1: Whispering the Language of Sin

Considering sin in therapy...