History Teaches…Will We Humbly Learn?
When I describe my approach to biblical counseling, I highlight 6 convictions. Among those is my conviction that biblical counselors should be “church history-informed.” We demonstrate humility when we are willing to learn from that great cloud of past spiritual witnesses—from Christians soul physicians throughout church history.
Some in our modern biblical counseling movement seem instinctually prone to minimize the potential role of the body in various issues such as depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar depression, schizophrenia, etc. It appears that part of their hesitancy is the fear that we are caving to the modern materialistic perspective that we are only bodies. Unfortunately, this fear often leads us to swing the pendulum too far the other way, toward a gnostic, spiritualistic perspective that we are all soul, rather than embodied-souls.
I have found it helpful to consider how our predecessors in the faith—especially those who ministered and wrote prior to the current modern materialistic worldview—saw the role of the body in issues like depression, anxiety, OCD, and scrupulosity. Consistently, they identified the body—the embodied-soul—as significantly intertwined with both the cause and cure of depression, anxiety, OCD, and scrupulosity. That is true, as we see in today’s
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