#5. Biblical counseling must be contextualized to new audiences.

The crucial issues of motivation, suffering, and the counseling relationship each concern our conceptual balance and
the way we go about our counseling. Crucial issue #5 is a different sort of issue. It focuses on with whom we speak
about what we believe. Biblical counseling needs to interact with a wider audience. We generally have spoken to the
‘conservative pastor in the trenches’ and to the ‘counseling-minded lay person.’ We have given them tools to
counsel more confidently and effectively. Our target audience has been the local church.

Biblical counseling must cultivate other audiences. We need to do so for our own edification as a truly biblical
movement. We need to do so in order to edify others with what God has given us. I would like to propose one
particular audience into which biblical counseling must be contextualized. We need to speak with Christian
academics. We have barely begun to generate meaningful dialogue with the faculty and students in Christian
colleges and seminaries.

Biblical counseling has been a grass-roots movement, finding its home in healthy local-church life. This is a great
strength. Biblical counseling gets established in local churches because it works to transform lives. It works to
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transform lives because it is God’s pattern for ministry love woven through with truth. But we generally, and
unfortunately, have been shut out from intellectual and educational centers. We have shut ourselves out because we
have not addressed that audience. Biblical counseling does have intellectual integrity and power and yet is not
speaking to the more intellectual segments of Christian culture. Indeed, it often is dismissed as anti-intellectual and
simple-minded.

How do we explain this and answer the charge? I believe that the answer essentially boils down to a matter of
audience analysis. Jay Adams wrote to the local church. He consciously selected his audience. He spoke the
language of persuasion to that audience. Like any good preacher of the Word of God, he concealed his intellectual
‘bones’ within vivid illustrational and practical teach- ing. He gave people something to respond to, believe in, and
act upon. He did not dwell on qualifications, counter-instances, and nuances. He simply sought to speak clearly,
simply, and persuasively. Of course he over-generalized and over- simplified. This was not because Adams does not
believe in complexities and vexed questions. It was because he does believe in the primary importance of certain
central, life-changing, and essentially simple truths.

Critics have misread simple for simplistic. Biblical counseling is informed by a highly developed theological
tradition. Its roots are as ‘intellectual’ as they are practical. Biblical counseling, however, like the Bible, is anti-
intellectualistic. This has generated a certain basic criticism of academia and the secular profes- sions. The
counseling world, Christian and non-Christian alike, guards its turf by creating technical vocabularies and
professional structures into which aspiring counselors must be initiated. Biblical counseling rightly has stressed that
wisdom lying open on the pages of Scripture is the sole criterion for counseling. We have opposed their pretension
to proprietary rights over knowledge and efficacy in the arena of counseling. We have opposed the professional
elitism inherent in secular psychology, an elitism mirrored in most ‘Christian counseling.’ We have opposed the
notion that non-biblical experts possess the turf of ‘psychological, emotional, behavioral, and interpersonal
problems.’ We have opposed the obscur- antism which substitutes technical jargon for plain talk, which confuses a
label or diagnosis for true knowledge. We even have thought that academia was not the primary arena in which to
discuss counseling. It is a secondary arena with well institutionalized pretensions to primacy. So we have addressed
the church because biblical counseling is meant for the daily lives of God’s people.

The grass roots always will and always should be the primary constituency for biblical counseling. First things first.
Among counseling systems nouthetic counseling has seen uniquely the centrality of Scripture, obedience to the
Lord, human responsibility, the fence of love, and the local church ministry. But, as in the other crucial issues, we
must redress imbalances. We need to reach out to the educational wing of the church of Christ. If we neglect
Christian academia, the development and spread of biblical counseling will be hindered seriously.

Much of the rejection of biblical counseling in Christian academia is because of the offense of the message. We
have challenged the intellectual and practical habits of secular professionalism, habits which are rampant in the
educational institutions and professional organizations of Christian counseling. But I am persuaded that much of the
rejection is also because we have not yet spoken their language. The offense is not the message but the medium and
style. Within a context of genuine dialogue we need to articulate the same truths in a form that is culturally ‘hear-
able.’

At minimum, we want people to disagree with us intelligently and not on the basis of a caricature. Repeatedly I have
encountered gross misunderstandings of what biblical counseling was all about in people who are not as far from our
basic commitments as we may think. I have encountered a number of folks from The Christian Association for
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Psychological Studies (CAPS) our ‘arch foes’ when it comes to counseling who have thought of us as crudely
behavioristic, lacking even the rudiments of a view of inner life and motivation. They think Adams’ comments about
a ‘feeling orientation’ meant biblical counseling discounted emotions as bad or irrelevant just as it discounted
everything about motivation and thinking.

But ‘feeling orientation’ is actually a profound motivational concept stated in street talk. It has nothing to do with
whether emotions are good or bad, important or trivial. ‘Feeling orientation’ is meant to communicate vividly to
counselees: children or adults, illiterate or educated. Our lives get in trouble because we interpret life via
unexamined subjective experience (“I feel that. . .”) and because we live for what we want (“I feel like. . .”) The
most profound issue in every person’s life is whether he is ‘feeling oriented’ or ‘Lordship oriented.’ Is he ruled in
detail by world, flesh, devil, desires, and idols? Or is he liberated into the rule of the Lord whose love and grace we
trust and delight in?

‘Feeling orientation’ often communicates well to the man in the pew or counseling office. But it bewilders scholars
who wrestle to make more precise sense of human motivation and emotions. The term confuses them rather than
edifies. Is that their fault? It is no more their fault than if I tried to counsel a troubled teenager by alluding to the
epithumiai tes sarkes without providing extensive translation and illustration! The solution? Analyze our audience.
Contextualize our insights to the questions they are asking and the language they speak. Biblical categories have a
powerful and subtle explanatory power. We are not being heard through the misunderstandings of what we are
saying. The responsibility to create understanding is first of all ours.

Many are alienated from our message for bad reasons, not good reasons. I have found many CAPS people come to
respect what we are saying once they understand it. Some love it. It is something for which they have been looking
but do not know where to find. We need to build relationships. Some people have experienced us, or imagined us, to
be prickly, impolite, and unfriendly. It is our fault if we allow such an image to be perpetuated.

We need to speak a different language to target a different people group. At the simplest strategic level we must
employ the article and book that deal with theoretical questions, ambiguities, and complexities. We must have at
least some ‘non-popular’ writing. Our immediate goal must be to generate an extended dialogue, to listen as well as
to hear. This strategy differs from the sermon, which consciously simplifies in order to edify immediately. Of course
I believe that those who oppose us need the insights about psychology and biblical counseling that we have. But I
also believe that we need the (many?!) allies and constructive critics we will find amid the current ‘opposition.’

To date we have reached thousands of Christian people with the message of biblical counseling. We need to
continue to reach these same people as our primary focus. The local churches are the salt of the earth, the light of the
world. But we also need to analyze a different audience and expend some legitimate effort in reaching the
educational wing of Christendom. Is addressing academia simply a nice idea to be attended to someday? I think it is
a crucial issue now. The future of the local church is involved! Where are the church leaders and counselors of
tomorrow being trained today? They are being trained in institutions where biblical counseling is dismissed with a
wave of the hand.

We are on a narrow base at the moment. I am convinced with my whole heart that God has given us ‘biblical-
nouthetic counselors’ some outstanding and needed insights. Richard Lovelace, in summarizing the counseling
needs of the church of Christ, commented, “The counseling approach which is most likely to help in congregational
renewal is a tuned and adapted form of nouthetic counseling.”1 This paper is in part a call for such ‘tuning and
adapting’ to occur in some critical intellectual areas. But the crucial issues facing us are social as well as intellectual.
I am convinced that we are shut up in a fairly narrow sector of believing Christendom and that to spread the word
more widely will bless, stimulate, and change us as much as edify others.