Untwisting Scriptures and offering the Living Water, to help others (especially those who have been abused) experience the joy to be found in Jesus Christ
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 …
Continue reading “No “Digging Up the Past” Allowed: A Response to Nouthetic (“Biblical”) Counseling”
An abuse survivor who experienced the nouthetic counseling that is called “Biblical” describes it and makes a plea for change.
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “If “Jane” From The Master’s University Were to Seek “Biblical Counseling””
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
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 …
Continue reading “How Pedophiles Are Forgiven, From the Teachings of Jay Adams”
Part 1 in the Series: Competent to Examine Jay Adams and His Nouthetic Counseling I have posted about “nouthetic counseling” (later rebranded to be called “Biblical counseling”) more than any other tagged topic on this blog. But this series will examine Jay Adams’ writings themselves, drawing from the work of Valerie Jacobsen on her Facebook …
My despair Back in 1994 when I was studying Leviticus (because it was my wilderness book), I wrote this in the margin at Leviticus chapter 2 (the boldface is added now): Do you hear the wailing in my voice?