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
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.
Continue reading “Restoring a Pedophile, According to 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.
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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 to her about it and told her I would have to give her a zero. Wendy’s eyes filled with tears, her face contorted, and she said, “Miss Henry, I need to get saved!” Continue reading “How Pedophiles Are Forgiven, From the Teachings of Jay Adams”
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 page, with her permission.
Because all Christians have the Word of God and the Holy Spirit and life experience and access to the findings of brain science, so all of us can be competent to examine Jay Adams’ teachings. Continue reading “How Jay Adams Would Counsel a Pedophile”
It’s actually a beautiful verse.
But sometimes it’s used as a cudgel.
After I had heard two different people refer to this Bible verse as a verb (as a cudgel that had been used against them), I knew it was time to write about it.
Here it is: Continue reading “Have You Been Philippians 4:8’d?”
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 conjures a picture of going to a graveyard to dig up the bones or even the rotting corpse of something that needed to be left underground to decompose the way it’s supposed to. A perverted and possibly very harmful activity. Continue reading “No “Digging Up the Past” Allowed: A Response to Nouthetic (“Biblical”) Counseling”
Read Part 1 here. Read Part 2 here.
In Quieting a Noisy Soul, author Jim Berg declares that the cause of the noisy soul is your sin: your unbelief, your discontent, and your guilty conscience (and as it turns out, your pride and your stubbornness). Throughout his nouthetic counseling teachings (nowadays called “Biblical counseling”), he assumes that the situation or person the counselee would have thought was causing the noisy soul is not a legitimate concern, but is instead simply the catalyst for sin in the heart, “a lust for more.” Continue reading “Cleanse Your Guilty Conscience, Get Grace, and Other Solutions to the Noisy Soul: A Response to Jim Berg (Part 3)”
Jim Berg claims that this nouthetic counseling program Quieting a Noisy Soul presents the solutions to anxiety, despair, obsessive compulsive behavior, panic attacks, anorexia, bulimia, and other problems.
Part 1 of this series covered the Problem (the noisy soul) and the Cause of the problem according to Jim Berg’s nouthetic counseling: your sin, specifically, your unbelief and your guilty conscience. “Noisy souls,” says Berg, “are self-absorbed souls.” Continue reading “The Solutions to the Noisy Soul: A Response to Jim Berg (Part 2)”
It’s one thing to hear or read Berg’s teachings through the ears of one who has sinned—for example, one who has traumatized another. It’s quite a different thing to listen or read through the ears of one who has been sinned against, that is, the oppressed. Continue reading “Quieting a Noisy Soul by Jim Berg: A Response (Part 1)”
Note: The “Biblical counseling” being critiqued here is actually nouthetic/admonishing counseling. There are many people who counsel Biblically who do not counsel this way.
This is the third and final installment in a series of articles of commentary on Caroline Newheiser’s lecture “Lving with an Angry Husband,” which you can listen to at this link here (and I especially encourage you to listen to it if you think I may be misrepresenting what Caroline says).
Part One of this commentary series is here (link) and Part Two is here (link).
In her lecture, Caroline Newheiser explains the “right way” for a woman to ask for help with her angry (cruel) husband, and how church people should help. Continue reading “Getting Help With an “Angry Husband,” According to “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 One commentary here (link). Continue reading “Don’t Be a Martyr, but Do Suffer in Your Marriage to an Angry Husband (and Other “Biblical Counseling”)”