The Problems with Jay Adams’ Nouthetic Counseling Works-Sanctification Doctrine
Jay Adams’ nouthetic counseling methods have done great damage to the abused. How has his view on sanctification distorted the Christian life?
No “Digging Up the Past” Allowed: A Response to Nouthetic (“Biblical”) Counseling
Sometimes I talk with people who want healing and help from the Lord but are hesitant to “dig up the past” or who have counselors who don’t want them to “dig up the past.” For a while now, maybe over a year, I’ve been mulling over that pejorative expression. “Digging up the past” to me …
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Here’s an Abuse Survivor’s Plea about Nouthetic “Biblical” Counseling
An abuse survivor who experienced the nouthetic counseling that is called “Biblical” describes it and makes a plea for change.
“(Don’t) Save the Body”: A Response to John MacArthur’s Head of Counseling
I enjoy irony when it’s in the context of literature. When it’s in the context of a Bible teacher who seems to be completely oblivious about the contradictions of his statements, it makes me feel like I need to practice my breathing techniques. Apparently, according to professor John Street, head of counseling at John MacArthur’s …
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Getting Help With an “Angry Husband,” According to “Biblical Counseling”
There are prerequisites, apparently, for how a woman seeking help with an angry husband—a husband whose cruelty is endangering her and her children and causing them to live in fear—is supposed to approach others for help.
Don’t Be a Martyr, but Do Suffer in Your Marriage to an Angry Husband (and Other “Biblical Counseling”)
Yesterday I applied Caroline Newheiser’s lecture “Living with an Angry Husband” (link) to the wife of Devin Patrick Kelley, the man who shot and killed 26 people in a Texas church on November 5, 2017. It is a lecture that sounds a very uncertain call to the church, with contradictory counsel. You can read that Part …
Should the Texas Church Shooter’s Wife Have Gotten “Biblical Counseling”? #ChurchToo
Note: I put the term “Biblical counseling” in quotation marks not because I believe it’s wrong to counsel with the Bible. (Just the opposite is true, in fact.) But rather, because a certain group of people (nouthetic/”admonishing” counselors) have co-opted this term to apply to their style of counseling, when other counseling that uses the …
If “Jane” From The Master’s University Were to Seek “Biblical Counseling”
As Providence would have it, when “Jane’s” account of rape in the environment of The Master’s University went viral last week (link), I was barely aware, because I was cleaning bathrooms and listening to lectures on abuse. One of them was “Helping Women with Child Sexual Abuse in Their Past,” by Zondra Scott, whose husband …
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Restoring a Pedophile, According to Jay Adams
This article is Part Three of the series “Competent to Examine Jay Adams and His Teachings,” written with the help of Valerie Jacobsen. Part One, “How Jay Adams Would Counsel a Pedophile,” is here. Part Two, “How Pedophiles are Forgiven, from the Teachings of Jay Adams,” is here. Now it’s time for restoration
How Pedophiles Are Forgiven, From the Teachings of Jay Adams
This is Part 2 in my “Competent to Examine Jay Adams and His Teachings” series. Part 1, about counseling a pedophile, can be found here. ***** Many years ago when I was a very young and very naïve teacher at a Christian high school, I caught a student blatantly cheating on a test. I talked …
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