I don’t actually remember what got me onto this train of thought, but today I decided spontaneously to look up “Biblical Counseling” on the internet. The way it was taught in the church I grew up in was that it was simply the regulative principle applied to counseling. For those fortunate enough not to have come across the regulative principle before, allow me to summarize. Some people feel that if the bible says you can’t do something then you can’t do it, but that if the bible is silent on an issue, then it is permitted. The regulative principle says that only things that are specifically prescribed by scripture are permitted. That’s a bit hard to maintain on a day-to-day basis but people do attempt it, which is one source of families who reject TV, microwaves, birth control, clothes that they didn’t sew themselves, etc. (Yes, I knew these people.) Most people who ascribe to the regulative principle, however, only apply it to church services. Our church also applied it to counseling because that was considered “a matter of the heart.”
Let me share how that panned out. There was a single woman in our church who wanted more than anything to be a missionary. She kept dating men who were on the same career track but it never worked out. Finally, she asked the church to support her as she made a permanent move to another country to practice Christian counseling in the name of Jesus. Obviously, the church had a major issue with a woman trying to do anything godly without a man’s direct supervision, but I was actually surprised that that was not their primary objection. Even though this woman had earned both her bachelor’s degree and her master’s degree from the same extremely hard-line evangelical university, the pastor felt that secular psychology was mixed in with her methodology. He felt that only “biblical counseling” was acceptable and everything else was sin. He believed that absolutely everything that actual research has ever contributed to psychology was also sin, because according to the regulative principle everything is automatically sin unless the bible says it’s not. Have you ever heard of a double-blind study in the bible? Of course not. The best we get is Matthew 4:7 and Luke 4:12 telling us not to put the lord our god to the test.
In the end, I was permanently scarred by the pastor coming to meet me at my parents’ house (we couldn’t meet in a private space for fear that I would seduce the old fat ugly SOB), where he appeared interested in my emotional pain (my mom went to great lengths to ensure that I never experienced anyone actually attending to me), and then he proceeded to rebuke me and telling me that all my problems were because of my sin. Then my mom made it worse after he left because, you know, a sadist’s gotta sade.
In good news, the woman fought the church tooth and claw and eventually got their sponsorship. Then, she was the same woman who later gave me the name of a local Christian counselor who didn’t believe that research was sin. That counselor was the first real step in the direction of things turning around for me. (Not that I’m exactly living the dream right now, but even the psych hospital is a substantial improvement over my parents’ plans for me.)
Anyway, it seems that the single missionary woman was not alone because it looks like Ligonier Ministries also feels that psychology is sometimes okay:
Good luck finding a Calvinist psychologist.
Moving right along, years after I left home but way before I quit Christianity, a fellow church member gave me a book called Christians Get Depressed Too by David P. Murray. It offered a much more liberal and progressive viewpoint than my home church and I’m going to share it here because I get like five views a day on this blog on a good day and my primary audience is myself and I always cite my sources and if I ever get discovered and Murray comes after me, I’ll take it down. This is a section where Murray compares different pre-existing beliefs as to what causes depression. It comes immediately after a section entitled, “The Cause is all Physical,” which obviously summarizes a different point of view.
I feel like that’s probably as much as I can share without coming up against some hard intellectual property laws, but if you’re at all interested and haven’t read the book, you should. For Christians like I was at the time that I read it, it offers a more progressive angle than what we usually got. For everyone else, it gives a candid description of what it’s like to be an “insider” and the harmful beliefs that follow. Please note that although I’m thankful I got the book when I did because it opened my eyes that there could be a more compassionate worldview than the one I had been taught, when I look back on it now it seems awfully primitive. For example, I personally don’t think that medication on its own has any kind of fighting chance against Religious Trauma Syndrome. Some church people were “kind” enough to insist that my depression wasn’t necessarily the result of my sin and was probably, in fact, a genetic condition. It was not until years and years later that I figured out that the church’s 🤬-ed up worldview was what was pouring fuel on the fire. It sucks when the thing that you thought was the solution actually turns out to be the cause of the problem.
Which leads me to my next point. This video came out in 2015 and and according to YouTube, I had already watched it in its entirety before today. It was probably sometime shortly after it came out, because I remember watching it and soaking it all in. It was basically a slightly toned-down version of what I had been taught my entire life, but it seemed so academic and intellectual. R.C. Sproul was a revered household name, just like Ravi Zacharias, and I still think of him fondly enough that I really hope no horrible scandals break out about him now that he’s dead.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations on getting through Part 1. I watched Part 2 for the first time today. It would seem like it would be triggering but honestly, it’s just validating that I didn’t actually make this stuff up. I cannot tell my imaginary audience how many times I’ve looked into a mental health provider’s quizzical eyes and wondered if they secretly thought I hallucinated the whole thing. Surely there aren’t people running around with doctoral degrees ( https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-rc-sproul-obituary-20171215-story.html ) who are propagating this kind of stuff, right?
Buckle up for Part 2!
It’s been a while since I’ve heard such a clear explanation of “Ought does not imply can.” In my family, we took this a step farther and not only did we have moral inability to accept salvation, but we learned that we would always choose to do the most evil thing possible without God’s direct intervention. We explained the fact that non-Christians were capable of doing good works by inventing the term “common grace.” Common grace was the “holy hand of restraint” that allowed people do anything good at all, ever. This common grace was what God removed from Pharoah in Exodus 9:12, which Paul reasserts in Romans 9, lest anyone gloss over it as one more horrible thing that God did under the “old covenant.” It always frustrated me that if I did anything good then God got the credit, but if I “sinned,” then I got the blame.
Years of therapy later and I still am unable to make the mental connection between personal responsibility, and ability to intervene. I could do it as a tiny little kid. I argued with my parents that it was unfair that God already knew we would never stop sinning, but we were still morally responsible to not sin. I told my parents that I didn’t want to sin. They said that I was going to do it anyway.
So that’s how we get from “biblical counseling” to the regulative principle to R.C. Sproul to Total Depravity. This is how my mind works all day every day. This is why I’ve been here in the psych hospital for going on a year.
References
Comas, M. E. (2017, December 15). Prominent theologian R.C. Sproul of Sanford dies at 78. Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved September 22, 2021 from https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-rc-sproul-obituary-20171215-story.html
Ligonier Ministries. (2018, December 4). Since the Bible is sufficient for all of life, should we rule out psychology in counseling? [YouTube video]. Retrieved September 22, 2021 from https://youtu.be/g0f6VxbP0GU
Ligonier Ministries. (2015, March 12). Total Depravity (Part 1): What is Reformed Theology? with R.C. Sproul [YouTube video]. Retrieved September 22, 2021 from https://youtu.be/RvUpyxnqAow
Ligonier Ministries. (2015, March 12). Total Depravity (Part 2): What is Reformed Theology? with R.C. Sproul [YouTube video]. Retrieved September 22, 2021 from https://youtu.be/zPVkhssUv5I
Murray, D. (2010). Christians Get Depressed Too. (pp. 19-24). United States: Reformation Heritage Books.
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