When I was in seminary in the 1980s, open warfare broke out over competing counseling models. During these debates, I was struck by the fact that no one was using church history as a guide to assess modern church counseling approaches. I kept thinking:
“Surely the church has always been about the business of helping hurting and hardened people!”
So I started reading everything I could find (this was before Google and Amazon) on the history of soul care. For the past 40 years—that’s a whole generation—I’ve continued that study of church history.
Sure enough, I have been able to learn a great deal about what makes biblical counseling truly biblical and what makes Christian counseling truly Christian by learning from that great cloud of historical witnesses—Christians who have been counseling one another for the past 2,000 years.
Biblical Counseling Before the Modern Biblical Counseling Movement
The “modern biblical counseling movement” was launched in the 1970s by Jay Adams. Jay wrote in an era where many in the church were seen as abdicating their responsibility to counsel God’s people. Or, if pastors were counseling God’s people, they often focused on secular psychology rather than on biblical principles. Jay launched
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