LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) — The Christian counseling department of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which defined the role of pastoral counseling for generations of ministers and Christian counselors, will make a wholesale change by emphasizing “biblical counseling” over behavioral science.
The move is a departure from the previous integrative or “collaborative” approach, favored by many pastoral counseling professors and advocates, which teaches both behavioral sciences and biblical theology to minister to a person's needs.
The move drew unfavorable responses from several Christian counseling specialists who were students of Wayne Oates, the former Southern Seminary professor who established the school's “psychology of religion” department more than 50 years ago and who is considered a pioneer in the pastoral counseling field.
According to a report from the seminary's news office, the new vision for the department “is a wholesale change of emphasis built upon the view that Scripture is sufficient to answer comprehensively the deepest needs of the human heart.”
Seminary officials characterized the school's previous model as one that prepared therapists for state licensure more than it did for ministry in the local church.
“We're very concerned with the way in which so many institutions are really being driven by licensure demands in the way that we really intentionally want to be driven by the needs of the churches,” said Russell Moore, dean of the school of theology and senior vice president for academic administration.
Moore called the previous approach to integrate theology and psychology a “failed” model “because it is so naïve about the presuppositions behind secular psychologies.”
“I think we're seeing now that psychotherapy is not one vision of science,” he said. “You can't simply say you're going to integrate the science of psychotherapy with Scripture because there are only sciences and theories of psychotherapy that are contradictory and incoherent.”
Wade Rowatt, a former professor at Southern Seminary and a counselor at the St. Matthews Pastoral Counseling Center, said the same criticism of multiple and contradictory interpretations could be said of biblical theology, but ministers still learn and apply the Scriptures and integrate them with specific understandings of human personality.
“I don't want to pick a fight with Southern Seminary,” said Rowatt, whose counseling center is affiliated with St. Matthews Baptist Church. “I don't want to pick a fight with this other model. But I do want to speak a clear word of support for the model that has been terminated — that has been there 60-something years. It's a system that's produced chaplains' programs in hundreds of hospitals, that has trained hundreds of military chaplains, thousands of pastors to be effective care-givers in their congregations.”
In the seminary's news report, President Al Mohler said the program will emphasize teaching pastors and other church leaders how to apply Scripture comprehensively to the concerns and crises of everyday life.
“In this psycho-therapeutic age, it is really important that we think as Christians, that we employ authentically Christian thinking — biblical thinking — to human life, and that we do this in a way that, without apology, confronts and critiques the wisdom of the age and seeks the wisdom that can come only from God and from God's Word.”
But Vicki Hollon, executive director of the Wayne Oates Institute, said seminary officials are creating a false dichotomy “by implying that pastoral care and counseling is not and has not been biblical.”
“They have created the proverbial straw man,” Hollon said. “And their movement away from science reveals a lack of faith, or at least a fear that somehow science is outside the realm of God's creation and domain.”
The Louisville-based institute was established to advance the field of pastoral counseling, the focus of Wayne Oates' writings and teaching. Oates taught at Southern from 1948-74 and afterward at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. The author of 57 books, including “The Christian Pastor,” Oates died at the age of 82 in 1999.
“Dr. Oates' unique contribution was to lead Baptists to say we need to be thoroughly informed about understanding persons through personality theory, and understanding families through family systems theory, and understanding groups of people — understanding society,” Rowatt said, “and then integrating it with sound biblical theological scholarship in constructing a theory for the pastoral shepherding of persons.”
Rowatt described the process as a “trialogue,” with “the minister, the person in crisis and the Holy Spirit, seeking wholeness and healing in a spiritual journey.”
But Moore said such a process is leading to the inclusion of counter-Christian beliefs in such programs. “What we're seeing in other institutions is an integrationism in which Freudian and Darwinist and behaviorist understandings of human nature are just uncritically accepted into a Christian worldview.”
Rowatt, who is also a professor of pastoral counseling at the new Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, countered that he hasn't seen the teachings of Freud advanced in any Christian pastoral counseling program he's aware of. “We don't train junior psychologists and psychiatrists,” he said. “We train pastors who have a knowledge of Bible theology and the behavioral science and supervision in the integration of that for the practice of ministry.”
Roy Woodruff, retired executive director of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors and a student of Oates, said the implication that the previous pastoral counseling model was not biblically based “is either totally ignorant or totally arrogant, and I don't know which.”
Southern officials said the new direction is not a new degree program but will involve “a wholesale change of emphasis.” The seminary's master of divinity degree with an emphasis on pastoral counseling was renamed the “master of divinity with an emphasis on biblical counseling.” Its master of arts in Christian counseling was renamed “master of arts in biblical counseling.”
The 70 students already enrolled in both previous degree programs can finish the degrees they started, said Lawrence Smith, Southern's vice president for public relations.
In the new model, students will take courses that deal with such topics as biblical and theological foundations for counseling, marriage and sexuality, parenting and family, and biblical foundations for the nature of personhood. Moore said Southern will teach women to counsel other women.
The new direction does not deny the existence of some mental conditions that science attributes to chemical imbalances, such as bipolar disorder or severe depression, Moore said. “The problem is, e are living in an era in which there is the notion that there is a pharmacological solution to every human problem.”
Hollon and Rowatt said the new program will produce students who cannot gain the accreditation or certification required by many agencies for such roles as hospital, hospice or prison chaplain.
“Omitting knowledge from the behavioral sciences and the hard sciences will produce ill-equipped pastors, chaplains, counselors who will have knowledge of the tip of the iceberg without comprehensive understanding of the other factors,” Rowatt said.