Theology for Better Counseling

Trinitarian Reflections for Healing and Formation

Virginia Todd Holeman

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780830839728
• eBook ISBN: 9780830866045
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

At one time, Virginia Todd Holeman "Toddy" thought being biblically literate was all she needed and had little interest in what real theologians talked about. But in her counseling she found that clients pressed her for more.They didn't just want what she had gained through training in the best theories and practices available for counseling. They asked hard theological questions often related to their suffering. As she describes it, they experienced a kind of "theological disequilibrium . . . which left them discouraged, disoriented and often distraught."Holeman shows how deep and clear theological reflection can make a major difference in counseling practice. Not only can it shape who we are, it can also bring into greater alignment our theological commitments, our therapeutic practices and our professional ethics. All the while it can have the most practical effect on our counseling sessions. In this volume Holeman guides counseling students, pastoral counselors and licensed mental health professionals into becoming as well-formed theologically as they are trained clinically.

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

Is All This Fuss About Theology Really Necessary?

Give me the enlarged desire,

And open, Lord, my soul,

Thy own fullness to require,

And comprehend the whole;

Stretch my faith’s capacity

Wider, and yet wider still

Then, with all that is in Thee

My soul forever fill!

Charles Wesley (1707–1788),

“Give Me the Enlarged Desire”

I confess. For the years that I worked as a licensed professional counselor, I gave no thought to serious theological reflection. I had been trained in Christian counseling. I was biblically literate. What more did I need? To me serious theology was dry, dull, boring and seemingly irrelevant to my everyday life. The topics that I assumed interested real theologians held no interest for me. I found little place for serious theology in the midst of my clinical work. God forgive me for my ignorance and naiveté.

A little background information will help you appreciate the full extent of my confession. Before I became a licensed professional counselor, I had earned a degree in Christian ministries. I had to take a few courses in theological and biblical studies as part of my curriculum. The theology courses covered the major doctrinal categories in a systematic way. That is, I learned about the doctrine of God (theology proper), of Christ (Christology), of the Holy Spirit (pneumatology), of the church (ecclesiology) and so forth. My biblical studies classes presented overviews of Old and New Testament. Upon graduation I was hired to work in a local church as their director of Christian education and youth ministries. I used the biblical knowledge and skills I had obtained in graduate school, but I rarely thought of myself as engaging in theological reflection, because in my mind I wasn’t a theologian. I could state what I believed about God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. I could even spell and define the “big” theological words like omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience, and even some of the “-ologies”—like soteriology or eschatology. Yet I was far more interested in practical and concrete application than systematic and philosophical theology. If one of my professors had told me that there was nothing more practical than good theology, which they probably had, I had forgotten their exhortation.

Fast forward a few years, and I have now decided to pursue a degree in pastoral psychology and counseling at a nearby seminary. My goal was to learn all of the counseling theories and techniques that I could absorb and to waive as many of the required Bible and theology classes as I could get away with. I already had earned a degree from a Christian graduate school in Christian ministry, and I was a relatively biblically literate Christian! What more did I need? In spite of my best efforts, I did have to take several regular seminary courses as part of my counseling curriculum. I approached them begrudgingly. I did not come to study doctrine or church history. I could not possibly imagine how these classes could relate to my career as a licensed professional clinical counselor. Classes on specific books of the Bible were okay. I could see how additional biblical knowledge could fit into my counseling tool bag. But I had no room for more formal theological studies and I was not challenged to read theological works within my counseling courses. I thought that it was enough that I had mastered the model my program taught to me that integrated Christianity and counseling.

Upon graduation, I worked in a Christian counseling practice. As was appropriate and with my clients’ permission, I used the Bible, the Christian counseling model I had learned and books written by other Christian mental health professionals to augment my work with clients. If asked, I would affirm that I counseled from a Christian worldview or that I was a Christian counselor. For the most part that was adequate for the day. Yet there were times when my clients pressed me for more—when they asked important questions that arose from their life circumstances. “Where was God while I was being raped when I was a missionary?” “How could God let this tragedy happen to my loved one?” Some of my clients struggled with wanting to forgive someone who had hurt them deeply and unjustly, but could not do so at that time. They wondered if God would reject them. Other clients no longer wanted to be threatened or beaten in their own home. They knew that God hated divorce, and they felt guilty for contemplating divorce from their abusive and unrepentant spouses. They desperately wanted to obey God but they also wondered if that implied that God had assigned “spouse abuse” as their particular cross to bear.

These clients labored to make Christian sense of their suffering and they were asking for my help. They were not asking for a seminar on theology but were, in fact, asking hard theological questions. They agonized over a disconnection between their assumptions of what they believed God could or should do for them and their present painful circumstances. Some wrestled with the problem of evil and the justice of God, or the question of theodicy. Others were confounded by a theological dissonance between their understanding of God’s sovereignty and their experience of being “trespassed against” severely and unjustly. From one perspective these clients were living with a conflict between their explicit knowledge of God and the Christian life and their implicit knowledge of living as followers of Jesus. What had happened to them or their loved ones just did not fit with their “in the bones” understanding of God. As a result they experienced a kind of theological disequilibrium or a theological cognitive dissonance, which left them discouraged, disoriented and often distraught.[1] By the grace of God I was able to walk beside my clients as they journeyed through these unexplored and unwelcome theological places. I wish I could say that these experiences drove me to read theology more deeply and more personally. They didn’t. I was at a point in my professional development where I had a greater craving for more techniques in my counseling toolkit than I had a desire for more theology for clinical reflection.

A few more years and a doctoral degree later I accepted a faculty position at Asbury Theological Seminary. Here I met my theological Waterloo. I came face to face with the realization that I had skated by with thin theological reflection for years. If I was going to teach in a counseling program that took theological integration seriously, then I had some important study and personal growth ahead of me. The language of theology is different than that of therapy, and I applied myself to learn this new lingo and to let this new language seep into the core of my being to help me become more of the person (and clinician) that God was calling me to become. Broadening my explicit study of theology and biblical study went hand in hand with deepening my relationship with God. I experienced a kind of conversion of my imagination, a “transformation of ideals and perceptions, and a resocialization into a new community of reference and faithfulness.”[2]

I began to read books written by real theologians. I also formed friendships with faculty colleagues whose areas of expertise were theology or biblical studies. Many of these friends also were interested in interdisciplinary dialogue, so while I helped them to understand my world of counseling, they helped me to understand their world of theological and biblical study. Several of them were kind enough to review things that I wrote for publication. I wanted to be sure that I represented their discipline correctly. I was becoming more theologically fluent and was able to translate thick theological concepts into everyday language and life for myself, my clients and my students. Finally I began to think and live theologically at an enriched level.

Lest I misrepresent the scope of my theological forays, I didn’t read everything in theology (I still find philosophical theology most challenging to understand). Instead I attended to theological topics that resonated with clinical issues and personal interests. The theological and therapeutic turn toward relationality is an example of this kind of convergence.[3] As postmodern therapies and neuroscientific discoveries deepened my understanding of self-identity as “person-in-relationship,” theologians expanded my understanding of the Trinity as “divine-person-in-relationship.”[4] Theological perspectives on human relationships enriched my study of individual, couples and family counseling.[5] Several theologians explored theologies of Christian forgiveness at the same time that I was involved with empirical studies on psychological forgiveness.[6] Biblical and theological work on God’s justice resonated with my interest in counseling as a form of advocacy for social justice.[7] Other theologians wrestled with human suffering in light of the goodness of God, which contributed to my work with crisis and trauma counseling.[8] Today I could no more think of counseling without a solid theological foundation than I could imagine consulting a medical doctor who had only a rudimentary understanding of anatomy!

Perhaps aspects of your story are similar to mine. You might be a counseling student in a Christian counseling program. You love your counseling classes and you may tolerate classes outside of your discipline (especially if they happen to be theology, biblical study or church history). Or you could be a licensed mental health professional or a pastor, and you want to strengthen your ability to weave your Christian faith into your counseling practice. On the other hand you could be a person who is keenly interested in anything related to the integration of counseling and theology. My first goal in this book is to awaken in you a desire to drink deeply from theological wells so that you will be as well-formed theologically as you are clinically. To that end I encourage you to read broadly to become as fluent as possible in your own theological tradition and become as knowledgeable as possible about others. That way you may have a better sense of which theological stream a particular author swims in (e.g., Anabaptist, Baptist, Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic, Wesleyan).[9] If you think through the content of the books on your shelf that speak to the integration of Christian theology and psychology or counseling, authors may or may not make their theological home-base explicitly known. And most readers do not mind this at all.

Yet I think that paying closer attention to the particularity of one’s theological roots has benefits. In this way you not only know the degree of commonality that different theologies share, but you also become more alert to their distinctiveness (some subtle and some not so subtle)—which can become a therapeutic hidden bias, especially when clients give consent for the integration of spirituality in their counseling. It is beyond the scope of this work to highlight the uniqueness found in the major or minor streams of Christianity. But I can use information from my own theological home to serve as an example. I hope that you will be inspired to deepen your own spiritual walk as you learn more about mine, and that you will be challenged to turn to some of the primary sources from your theological home base.

So in the interest of informed consent—my theological orientation is found among the family of theologies that arose from the teachings of John Wesley (1703–1791). Wesley was an eighteenth-century Anglican clergyman who called attention to “practical divinity,” or practical theology in today’s lingo. Some readers may remember that Wesley’s Methodist movement brought about a revival of sorts in eighteenth-century England. Where Wesley’s own Anglican Church concentrated its ministry on the well-to-do, Wesley risked their ecclesial wrath and took the gospel message to the common person, to the highways and byways, to the poor as well as the rich.[10] He emphasized the importance of interpersonal relationships for spiritual growth. He developed discipleship groups and trained the laity (men and women) to be small group leaders.[11] These commitments resonate with twenty-first-century therapeutic commitments to social justice and community counseling models.[12] Since the 1990s a number of mental health professionals have been writing about the relationships between psychology/counseling and Wesleyan theology.[13]

John Wesley was a man of God with an overarching concern for lived Christianity. His dual emphasis on “knowledge and vital piety” combined his unswerving commitment to the significance of scriptural truth in the believer’s life (personal holiness) with his unswerving commitment to the centrality of communal practices of a lived faith in the church’s life and mission (social holiness). Although Wesley read widely and wrote ceaselessly, he never published a theological “magnum opus.” Instead Wesley embedded his theology of God in his sermons and tracts, in his notes on Scripture and in his copious correspondence with his colleagues, congregants and critics. Wesley discussed theology in everyday terms, highlighting the concrete difference that being a follower of Jesus should and could make in one’s life. Wesley considered theology a matter of “practical” or “experimental divinity.” Do not confuse Wesley’s use of the term experimental with our notion of hypothesis testing. Think more of experiential than experimental. A notation in the Wesley Study Bible provides this comment on John Wesley’s use of experience:

John Wesley’s theology, while grounded in Scripture, grew from experience—his and that of others. In the Church of England during Wesley’s time, Christians drew upon three sources to discern questions of faith and life: Scripture, tradition (particularly the early history of the church), and reason. To these three, Wesley added, or at least emphasized, experience as a source, highlighting awareness of God’s presence and work in the lives of individuals.[14]

Contemporary Wesleyan scholar Ken Collins clarifies that for Wesley “experimental or practical divinity is participatory and engaging. It entails nothing less than the actualization and verification of the truths of Scripture with respect to inward religion (by grace through faith) within the context of the Christian community.”[15] Wesley longed for people to experience the objective reality of God’s amazing love for humanity as revealed to us through the living Word (Jesus Christ) and the written Word (the Bible), and as made known to us through the Holy Spirit. When people received God’s love, transformation happened—God’s love spilling over in the lives of ordinary men and women in acts of love for their neighbor as a testimony to and as a result of their love for God.

Wesley’s emphasis on practical divinity is a good fit for theologically reflective ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Is All This Fuss About Theology Really Necessary?
• 2 A Metamodel of Theologically Reflective Counseling
• 3 A Theologically Reflective Counseling Relationship
• 4 Responsible Living
• 5 Out of the Office and into the Streets
• 6 Just Forgive?
• 7 See Now in the Light of the Not Yet
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author