Why ACBC Christian Counseling Cannot Help People: Bad Soteriology; Revised and Edited
Note: ACBC; Association of Certified Biblical Counselors
Predominate in Christian circles is the idea that Christ’s death on the cross “covers” the sins that we commit as Christians. This not only sounds logical, but is something I bought into most of my Christian life. One of my favorite Christian songs, formally, states the following:
I know someday I will be free
The weight of sin shall be released
But for now He covers me
In a lesson taught by counseling guru Martha Peace (ACBC advocate and speaker), she states the following:
The Bible teaches us that when God saves someone, he cleanses them from their sin – past sin, present sin, and future sin as the Lord Jesus Christ “bore our sins in His body on the cross” (1 Peter 2:24).
Let’s think about this for a moment. If Christ died for our future sins, does this not necessitate the reapplication of His death to sins committed by Christians? Whether your answer is “yes,” or “no,” that is the assertion and logical conclusion of the soteriology that dominates the American church in our day: Calvinism. Furthermore, it is the soteriology that dominates the present-day Christian counseling culture.
The result is the biggest scam ever perpetrated on Christianity since a counseling session between Eve and the serpent. Christians en masse go to “Christian” counseling centers for personal change, but most often, they are being counseled by those who believe most Christians are not ready for the hard truth of the Protestant Reformation gospel: people don’t change; people can’t change; they can only glorify the works of Christ in the gospel while experiencing joy in the midst of circumstances no matter what they are. It’s reversed self-esteem: feeling good about ourselves because we are doing good is sin, but feeling good because we are totally depraved is God’s glory. We see a hint of this in the aforementioned lesson by counseling queen Martha Peace:
This aspect of Sanctification begins at the moment God saves you and “progresses” throughout the rest of your life. It is a life-long process of being transformed into more of Christ’s image.
Notice that we don’t really change, but are “transformed” into an “image” of “Christ.” Do we change personally as new creatures in Christ, or are we merely transformed into an “image”? Though Peace’s lesson is peppered throughout with lingo suggesting a colaboring with God in sanctification, her deception, whether deliberate or witless, is revealed in her citations of the Reformed Mystic Walter Marshall:
True holiness understands that we are by nature totally powerless and unable to live a holy and righteous life that God requires [viz, perfect law-keeping].
Notice that “true holiness” is NOT something we DO, but something that we “understand.” In a myriad of Protestant contemporary writings, sanctification is framed as an “experience” and a “knowing.” The DOING aspect is continually fustigated in clever ways that suggest well-doing in sanctification necessarily equals an attempt to earn our justification (because a requirement of perfect law-keeping remains as the standard for justification; not the new birth and God’s indwelling seed). And this, my friends, is the crux of the soteriological issue. If Christ’s death must be applied to Christian sins, the logical conclusion is that justification is not a finished work and further atonement is needed for future sins. This makes the “means” of holiness in sanctification critical. And what are those means? Peace continues:
True holiness understands that God will not help you live a holy life unless you use the means God has given you to pursue this holy life – salvation and sanctification that will give Him all the glory.
Notice that “salvation” is the “means.” Hence, the same salvation that justified you also sanctifies you. Does that sound familiar? And that’s Calvin as well. I wish not to belabor the point as I cite the Calvin Institutes extensively to establish this fact, especially in It’s Not About Election and The Reformation Myth. If you wish, you can read 3.14.11 in the Calvin Institutes for a primer. It is basically preaching the gospel to yourself daily in order to keep future sins “covered” by Christ’s death on the cross.
So, what makes this sanctification covering biblically illogical? Primarily, a proper understanding of biblical law and gospel. Again, I have written extensively on this and do not wish to belabor the point, but will summarize it.
Christ died for sins committed “under the law.” “Where there is no law, there is no sin.” Unbelievers are “under the law” and “enslaved to sin.” Believers are “under grace” and “enslaved to righteousness.” Along with the contrary slaveries, there is also a freedom to do the contrary. No unbeliever sins perfectly, and no believer obeys perfectly. Even though Christians sin because they are free to succumb to the desires of the flesh, Christ is the “end of the law,” and therefore there is “no condemnation.” Clearly, again, CLEARLY, in Protestantism, the so-called “believer” remains under the law and its condemnation.
Furthermore, the old self that was under the law was crucified with Christ and no longer lives; so, see Romans 7, the new us is no longer married to the old us that was under the law. But unbelievers are still under the law, and will be judged by that written law and the law of conscience—that will not go well.
Believers are righteous even as they are righteous—they have God’s seed abiding within them (see 1John 3). Regardless of being clothed in humanity, believers are truly righteous beings who are able to please God by their obedience (see Romans 8). Sin resides in our mortality and weakness, but no longer enslaves us. However, all in all, our new direction is indicative of our righteousness while we are NOT judged by a perfect keeping of the law for we are under grace. “Under grace” is NOT being under the “righteous demands of the law” as the often heard buzz-phrase goes among Protestant pastors and elders.
Therefore, with proper biblical guidance, we are able to change in order to please God. We do not merely contemplate God’s grace and watch for a “transformation” of an “image.” Rather than depending on a finished work for a glory manifestation, we “move on to maturity” by learning how to “control our own bodies in holiness.” Contrary to Peace’s Reformed idea that the finished work of justification must continue to cover future sins by “revisiting the gospel afresh” (Michael Horton via Calvin), we apply God’s truth to our lives, and when we see the results, it makes us more and more sure of our “calling and election” because it indicates that we are no longer enslaved to sin and its desires. On the flip side, disobedience can cause a believer to doubt his/her salvation because they continually violate their consciences. Also remember that unbelievers are not concerned with assurance issues.
In contrast, Peace asserts in the same lesson, as Jerry Bridges and many others, that assurance comes from the belief that we can do nothing to please God in sanctification:
True holiness is produced in someone who is assured that they are forgiven and reconciled to God.
In other words, effort in sanctification supposedly shows that we are not resting in the continued salvific work of Christ. This is Calvin’s Sabbath rest salvation that I discuss in detail in chapter 4 of It’s Not About Election. In chapter 5, I discuss why this doctrine robs Christians of assurance. Biblical assurance comes from knowing that justification is a finished work that ended sin and its condemnation, not the idea that our sin is merely covered via “returning to the gospel afresh.” The ending of sin is good news, not a perpetual cover-up. In fact, many like Kevin DeYoung testify to the difficulty of assurance because, supposedly, the closer we get to God, the more we see how far we are from His holiness resulting in the need to be proclaimed saved by elders.
“But Paul, what about sins that we commit in our Christian life?” Well, we hate it, and therefore long to be saved from these mortal bodies of death, but we are not enslaved by it, nor can it condemn us. Assurance comes from the fact that justification and sanctification are totally separate; one is a finished work that ended condemnation, and the other increases our joy by an increased ability to please God by what we DO in kingdom living. We love God—He doesn’t love Himself by transforming us into an image of Himself IF we continue to live by faith alone in sanctification. James condemned that doctrine in his letter to the 12 tribes of the dispersion. Neither should we feel good about our supposed total depravity. Total depravity is not the source of joyful assurance because it increases our gratitude for our original salvation through a deeper and deeper understanding of how evil we are.
This, and many other reasons is why contemporary biblical counseling will not help Christians, but will rather destroy them.
paul
Putinanity, Cuba, Bill 1062, and Why Christians Need to Shut Up
I won’t go completely postal on my fellow Christians because I too once believed that it would be just wonderful if Jerry Falwell was President of the United States. And as a Christian, I have never been interested in Mike Huckabee being President because the world is a dangerous place and the last thing we need is some cornball from Mayberry RFD as leader of the free world.
Let us remember that Jesus could have run for President of the world, and would have won hands down, and could have summoned Michael the archangel to pay the world a little visit if people didn’t like it, but He didn’t. This should cause us to take part in a lost art, especially among Christians, known as “pondering.”
Christians, in our culture, speak out on a lot of things because they are free to do so. America is an open society to everyone. This is not to be confused with democracies that are democratically run by the elitists only. That’s a democratic caste system. In a truly open society, people are free to speak openly whether informed or uninformed. Unfortunately, Christians have cornered the market on uninformed free speech. Worse yet, it’s speech predicated on misinformation concerning what we are supposed to be experts at: the Bible.
As director of the TANC research institute, three years has taught me this: Christians don’t even understand the gospel, much less complicated world affairs. Yet, within Christianity, there is endless debate about various and sundry issues complimented by Scripture stacking along with an absurd claim of societal moral authority. Look, when people in our society have problems, they go to a psychologist or tune into Dr. Phil, and if they go to a pastor for anything more than instruction on what color of car to buy (we wouldn’t want a color symbolic of something we were unaware of), he is going to send you to a psychologist anyway.
This is why being a Christian in America right now is very exciting to me because it’s an adventure, and adventures are always fun when you partake with other people and you experience that adventure together. What is the adventure? We Christians don’t know anything; it’s an adventure of learning. I know, I know, listening to what others want us to know and pulling the rest from where the sun doesn’t shine is much easier, but the results are most unfortunate.
For instance, our research indicates that the VAST majority of Christians do not know the difference between grammatical interpretation versus redemptive interpretation of the Scriptures. These are the only two approaches to interpreting the Bible in Evangelical circles, and yield antithetical results in regard to truth and reality itself. But yet, Christians who do not even know how their own pastors interpret reality are shamelessly weighing in on what they perceive as the exclusive property of Christians: morality.
Why? Because our world is divided between Christians and non-Christians, the former being the only authority on morality. It’s ok to argue about morality in-camp—that’s our way of better defining our “expertise” to the world, and the absurdity of it all is evident. The challenge for Christians is to do life better than the world, but we think we hold that position by default; not so, that is a position earned through wisdom.
Hence, most American Christians think the separation of church and state is to protect the church from the state. State bad; Christianity good. Therefore, if the state is influenced by Christianity, that’s good! This has led to the recent phenomenon of Putinanity, a new form of Christianity:
“Gee-wiz, look, even Vladimir Putin of Russia is reaching out to the Eastern Orthodox Church in his country. I wish our politicians had that much sense!”
And Christians breathe a little easier in regard to Russia accordingly; they think this is like Putin agreeing to do lunch with Joni Eareckson Tada every Monday at noon. What Christians don’t understand is that the separation of church and state was designed to keep the state and the church separate from each other for the protection and freedom of mankind in general.
Church historian John Immel has a superb article on Putinanity that every Christian should read before they weigh in on Facebook. No, Russia is not seizing the international moral high ground from the US because Putin is getting in bed with the church, in fact, as Immel points out in the article, this should send cold chills up and down our spines. Immel lays out the historical background leading up to this contemporary happening that is not an anomaly by any stretch of the informed imagination.
And this is a by-point worth mentioning: Christians do not ask why any event takes place as if events take place in a vacuum. It’s ALWAYS the what, not the why. Example: endless articles concerning confusion over what pastor John Piper does. Some have even suggested that he does these things to get attention. No, if you really understand Piper by following the philosophical paper trail, you know that there is a why for everything he does, and the why may be closer to Putinanity than you think.
Neither is it far from the reality that mass death is always preceded by a promise of paradise. In the same way that a US delegation returned state side and proclaimed Cuba a socialist paradise, Jim Jones promised the same thing until the day 900 of his followers drank from the community Kool-Aid vat. Those who flew from the US to join Jones’ community in Guyana and lived to tell about it, state that they knew they were in big trouble the second they drove through the front gates. Jones was strongly endorsed by Governor Jerry Brown as Jones was part of the San Francisco socialist political machine. In regard to the recent Cuban adoring US delegation, they were called on the carpet by Marco Rubio.
If Christians knew their Bibles better, they would know that God ordained governments to serve mankind for the good of mankind. Government is a servant, not the enforcer of every Christian moralist idea that comes down the pike. The framers of the American Constitution never cited Romans 13 once, but were in agreement with it. Know also that God writes the works of His law on the heart of EVERY person born into the world, and their consciences either accuse or excuse based on that law ( Rom 2:12-15). If Christians aren’t careful, the world can often understand that law better than we do, and that is all too often the case.
This brings me to Arizona bill 1062, and another unfortunate example. Christians weigh in like this: Christian photographers good; homosexuals bad. Government enforcing the right for Christian photographers to refuse to do a homosexual marriage—good, and Putin says, “amen my brothers.” In many countries around the world, homosexuality is a capital offence as well as adultery, and for that matter, my granddaughter would have been put to death in Calvin’s Geneva for throwing a snowball at a pastor’s wife, especially since the offence took place in the sanctuary to boot.
Let me just narrow this issue down to my own family. I am close to family members who are homosexual. We get along great regardless of the fact that they know where I stand. How do they know? They tried to convince me that the Bible condoned it, and that was a conversation initiated by them. I stated my case in no uncertain terms. We get along great because the sensibilities of both parties are respected as a matter of conscience. This is very similar to how Christians who disagree should relate in regard to Romans 14. Sure, the Bible is specific revelation, and conscience is more general, but the latter is why we can live at peace with all men as much as it depends on us.
In fact, NFL players coming out of the closet, which is totally unnecessary, are in one sense demanding the approval of others for their own selfish reasons. Government shouldn’t enforce their supposed right to violate the sensibilities of others by forcing an employer to hire them anymore than Christians should want the Government in people’s bedrooms. So where do you draw the line? Conscience. Most people agree that pedophilia should be against the law, and so it is.
Admittedly, these are VERY difficult questions, but they should be considered by Christians via pondering and not pandering to the dictates of pastors frothing at the mouth while beating their pulpits on Sunday morning. That’s just plain ignorance.
All in all, this post is designed to provoke thought, but there is one place that I can drive a stake: contemporary Christianity is the product of the mindless following of tradition. I believe Bible wisdom is a wide-open frontier in this country. Granted, it is an old frontier, but mostly unchartered by Western bobbleheaded Christians.
Until that changes, we should keep our arrogant despotic mouths shut. Ignorance will not save people from the judgment to come. God does not entrust eternal matters to stupidity.
paul
Hey You Stinking Christian Serfs! Don’t You Know How to Approach a Pastor or His Wife?
Look, if you are going to bow down to the narcissistic pastorate in these last days, you should know how to do it correctly. For the cortically subilluminated herd, here is how you should approach a pastor:
http://jamesmacdonald.com/blog/a-sendoff-for-hungry-shepherds/ (supplement thought link)
And here is how you should approach a pastor’s wife:
http://www.gracecoversme.com/2014/02/what-not-to-say-and-what-to-say-to-your.html
Happy bobble-heading.
paul
Paul's Passing Thoughts 
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