Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 13:2 (Spring 2004)
Article: Reformational Counseling: A Middle Way
Author: Eric L. Johnson

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Reformational Counseling:
A Middle Way

Eric L. Johnson

Whatever happened to Christian soul-care? If one reads classical Christian literature, sermons, treatises, and letters, from the Patristic period, the Medieval period, and the Reformation and Puritan periods, one finds a wealth of material that deals with the care and improvement of the soul. One might even say that such an agenda forms the major thrust of Christian literature over the twenty centuries since the New Testament canon was closed. But something terrible happened in the twentieth century: evangelical soul-care literature largely dried up. With a few exceptions (e.g. A. W. Tozer, Martyn-Lloyd Jones, and Arthur Pink), most evangelical writing did not focus on improving the well-being of the Christian soul, concentrating instead on prepositional theology, evangelism and missions, and eschatology. Going back just to the nineteenth century, one can find a number of works written on pastoral theology by Evangelicals (e.g. Shedd, Fair-bairn, Bridges, and Murphy), but nothing of any consequence was written by an Evangelical during the first seventy years of the twentieth (though during this time, liberal pastoral theology was very active; see Hiltner, Oates, Wise, and Clinebell, to name a few), and virtually nothing evangelical addressed counseling prior to 1960.

During the 1960s and 70s, however, a major renewal of

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sorts was underway to fill the void. Since that time, two evangelical counseling movements have arisen, each vying for the role of guiding evangelical soul-care, but from very different standpoints. The first one, integrationism, arose from Christians who were professional counselors, trained in secular counseling programs, who knew that Christianity had something distinctive to contribute to soul-care and sought to integrate their faith and their evangelical worldview with the psychology and soul-care techniques they had learned.1 Integration continues to be the dominant evangelical approach to counseling among evangelical counseling professionals who seek to have their Christianity inform their practice. Justifying the integration agenda for relating one’s faith to secular psychology by reference to God’s general revelation and the assertion that “All truth is God’s truth,” integrationists have sought to develop models of counseling that were largely informed by modern (or secular) theory and research and that took seriously its findings regarding the impact of the brain, childhood experiences, and psychological structures on human well-being, but all of which was rendered compatible with evangelical commitments by being screened through and checked against...