There.

If you have continued to read beyond that first sentence, you have already completed the most controversial part of this book. That very first sentence should be the most debated statement in this entire work. A Theology of Biblical Counseling will do what theology often does—inspire questions and debate. But the most controversial statement I know to make in this context is to assert that counseling is, by definition, theological.

Most people do not assume the theological nature of counseling. Most believe that theology is what future ministers of the gospel study in seminary in order to be qualified to lead a church and preach sermons or go on the mission field. They do not understand that theology has a serious role to play in helping people with their counseling problems. They believe instead that counseling happens in the realm of psychology. Most believe that theology is to ministers what psychology is to counselors, and the two do not really have much to do with each other.¹

Christians have never believed, however, that theology serves so limited a role. They have insisted that theology informs all of life. Surveying the evidence for such a biblical position will demand more of this book than it should be expected to bear. Before we can proceed, however, it is essential to demonstrate, at the very least, that theology informs counseling. We will understand this when we see what theology is, what counseling is, and what counseling requires.

First, systematic theology is about the teachings of the entire Bible. It is not uncommon to hear some people express disapproval of theology in favor of biblical interpretation. They are concerned that our theological systems will exert a controlling and distorting effect on texts of Scripture. This concern is a possibility, but when it happens, it is bad theology, not good theology. Good theology is concerned with doing careful interpretation of all of the relevant texts in Scripture about a topic and then doing the hard work of discerning how to place those texts together. Good theology is not at odds with careful biblical interpretation, but stands on faithful interpretation of individual texts that seeks to understand these texts together in the context of the entire Bible.

A second element of this definition of theology is that it concerns what the whole Bible teaches us today. Good theology must be contemporary theology. Contemporary theology does not mean that we develop new truth in each age. Instead, it means that we seek to understand how the old truths in God’s Word apply to our contemporary setting. Many textbooks on Christian theology have been written during the history of the church. You might wonder why Christian authors continue to produce new works of theology when there are so many from the past. One reason is that the church continually confronts new threats to the truth of God’s Word. When this happens, Christians must take the ancient text of Scripture and apply it in ways that are freshly relevant. Good theology is not just a recitation of what the church has believed, though that is important. It also includes what the church must believe today in the midst of contemporary threats.

Finally, the definition of theology emphasizes that theology is concerned with establishing what the Bible teaches today about any given topic. The work of theology is to understand what God thinks about any topic. When we pay careful attention to every relevant passage in the Bible on a topic, we should know what God has revealed to us about that topic. In this book we are concerned with establishing what God has revealed about counseling. But first, we must understand what counseling is.

This definition is an intentionally inclusive one. Many people with many different counseling commitments could map all manner of conceptual and practical assumptions onto this definition, but I believe it covers the counseling that all of us are doing, whether it is at the lay or professional level or done with religious or secular commitments. Let me make two observations about this definition.

First, according to this definition, people are counseling all the time. You are counseling all of the time. Counseling is what happens when a woman with a diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder talks in the office of a man with degrees from Yale who is licensed by his state, charges a fee for their conversation, and bills her insurance company for it. Counseling is also what happens when a pastor talks with a woman who is considering leaving her husband and seeks advice from him about her options. Counseling is what happens when a boss calls an employee into the office to discuss a problem with job performance. Counseling happens when a fourth grader talks with his parents about kids being mean to him at school. It is what happens when a man calls his friend to ask for advice on taking a promotion at work.

Counseling, as all of these examples indicate, might be formal or informal, highly relational or more professional, religious or secular. Counseling happens whenever a person with questions, problems, and trouble seeks to talk with someone they believe has answers and solutions and can offer help. All of us do it all the time. There is no person or group of people who can lay claim to the exclusive right or prerogative to be a counseling practitioner.

Second, this definition has two sides. On the one hand, counseling requires one party in the conversation to have questions, problems, and trouble. One member of the counseling conversation must have a dilemma.³ The potential dilemmas are legion. The questions, problems, and trouble that consume counseling conversations are a lengthy list that defies enumeration. The list includes decisions about whom to marry, where to go to school, which job to take. It involves counseling those who are suicidal, in abusive marriages, addicted to drugs, hearing strange voices. Counseling conversations comprise doubts about whether someone should trust in Jesus Christ, what permissions the Bible grants about divorce and remarriage, whether the Holy Spirit is a vibrant part of one’s daily life. All of these and gazillions more are the kinds of things that hurting people put on the table when they seek assistance in conversations that we so often call counseling.

On the other hand, counseling requires another party in the conversation to have answers, solutions, and help. That means one party in the discussion must offer assistance for the dilemma being experienced by the struggling person. From the perspective of this book, and the larger biblical counseling movement, counseling is not mere commiseration. It is more than just hanging out. In order for counseling to occur, one participant in the conversation must move toward the struggling person with answers, solutions, and help.

For our purposes, we will refer to the person with questions, problems, and trouble as the counselee. We will consider the person with answers, solutions, and help to be the counselor. Counseling is a conversation that a counselee has with a person they believe to be a counselor.

Counseling does not require any of the trappings of professionalism. Though we often picture counseling as a very professional activity, it is not required that you be an expert in order to do it. Indeed, if what I stated above is true, most of the people doing counseling (i.e., teachers, parents, coworkers, friends, church members, etc.) lack any formal expertise to do it. As much as we often cherish the trappings of professionalism, like formal offices, distinguished degrees, and state licenses, none of that is required to do counseling—or even to do it well.⁴

I should also make another, potentially awkward, admission right out of the gate. In counseling there is no requirement that the person providing the counsel have correct answers, faithful solutions, or effective help. Do not misunderstand. We should want people doing counseling to offer sound answers, assistance, and help. Unfortunately, many people do not. Today, as you read this book, counselors all over the world—whether professional or unprofessional, trained or untrained, experienced or inexperienced—will offer counsel that is absolutely dreadful. A mother will tell her daughter to divorce her husband when she should not. A college student will tell his friend not to stress out about an overwhelming problem, which will be the very thing in his friend’s mind when he takes his own life. Right now counselors are telling men who hate being sexually attracted to other men that it is okay to be gay. This afternoon counselors will be harsh when they should be kind. Others will be flippant when they should be firm. Sometime today some counselor will send a woman with a black eye back into the house where her abusive husband lives. Unfortunately, there is no requirement that a person who practices counseling be any good at it.

So what is required to do counseling? If you do not need degrees or skill—things most would assume are a must—then what do you need? To do counseling, the one thing the counselor must do is articulate some vision of reality that understands the dilemma of the counselee and offers a response to that dilemma.

Everyone has commitments to a certain way of seeing life. Some people call this a worldview.⁵ Whatever the label, it is a vision about life, what it is, and how it works. This vision of life may be wise or foolish. People may or may not be self-conscious about their vision of life. But everyone possesses such a vision.

Anyone engaging in counseling will have a vision of life that includes who we are, what is wrong with us, what should be right with us, and what it would take to fix the problem. When someone is having a conversation about a problem they are having, that other person in the conversation is articulating an understanding of what it means to be human and experiencing life. He is explaining his understanding of why this person’s life does not appear to be working for them. He is providing his understanding of what is the normative standard for the person’s life—that is, the standard the person departed from that brought on the problem. Finally, he has some sense of how to help the person move from the dilemma to a solution.

God has spoken about these realities because he created them, forming them out of nothing. They are not subject to debate. We are who God says we are. What is wrong with us is what God says is wrong with us. There is no solution to our problem and no process of change other than the one God has provided. There is no other option available but to have a theological vision of reality. Every vision of reality about counseling will be theological. The only question is whether a counselor adopts a theological vision of reality that God believes is faithful—or unfaithful. We cannot choose to have a vision of reality that is not theological.

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