Paul's Passing Thoughts

Adams prefers to focus on what we can ascertain with certainty because people’s lives hang in the balance. Powlison prefers to “push the envelope” and test theories of change continually expedited by CCEF’s “research and development department” that he is so proud of.  This is necessary for purposes of finding more and more data as to why we should preach the gospel to ourselves and how that reductionist concept supposedly works in real life. Powlison has no qualms whatsoever in testing those theories on people’s lives.

We are not only in the second generation of biblical counseling, but we are also in the second gospel wave. The first gospel wave treated sanctification as unimportant and a distraction from “getting people saved.” The second gospel wave we are in now states that it is not only unimportant, but that it is completely irrelevant because it is really justification to begin with. Adams corrected the problems of the first wave and everyone agrees that it was a reformation and the beginning of the biblical counseling movement, but now the second generation wants to usher in another form of the first gospel wave while persecuting the cure to the former.

After yesterday’s post, I was still troubled in my spirit. I searched my heart, and I still think the issue is  discouragement concerning the lax attitude toward truth in our present day. Maybe it’s me. I was haunted all of my adult life because I continually asked myself, “What is truth? Is there any?” I had that conversation with myself most of my life. I observed the seemingly worthless cycle: Born, play, go to school, get a job, get married, have kids, go to ballgames, retire, fish, die. Why?

Then I became a Christian. I found what I was looking for my whole life. Is that one reason that I hold it dear? And then I was never taught the best way to apply that wonderful truth to my life in the first ten years of my Christian life. Is that why the persecution of Jay Adams troubles me so? “Oh come now Paul, persecution? There you go again-exaggerating!” Sorry, calling someone a Pharisee is no trite matter to me. Nor is the suggestion that the counsel that turned my life around is/was bogus. I don’t appreciate that.

Special note to my volunteer editing committee: Sorry, this is therapy. This is the only excerpt from the book that I will be posting before it goes to print if the Lord wills. I will be anxiously awaiting your feedback. I owe you guys some additional manuscripts as well, and let me say that your input has been awesome and has encouraged me much. Layman can have people too! The following manuscript from chapter nine is a work in process and the footnotes are full-size.

Chapter 9: Understanding By Contrast: The Jay Adams Reformation

The thesis of this book is seven-fold. First, New Calvinism is an expression of antinomian reductionism; specifically, gospel reductionism. It reduces the believers role in God’s spiritual work and plan to the least common denominator—primarily gospel contemplationism.

Second, it reduces the gospel to the saving work of Christ only—eclipsing the Father and Holy Spirit.

Third, because the believer’s role is reduced to a point that is not according to Scripture, he/she is deprived of the abundant life in a way God wants us to experience it for His glory and their arousing of  curiosity from  those who don’t have the hope of the gospel.

Fourth: it reduces the Scriptures to a historical gospel narrative only—a tool for contemplation. While that prism is singular, the system needed to make it work is so complex that it relegates God’s people to a pope-like reliance on those who fancy themselves as masters of mega-narrative interpretation.

Fifth: while reductionist theologies seek to reduce the believer’s role to the least common denominator, supposedly to make much of God and little of man, the elements that attempt to make it seem plausible are often complex and ongoing. Therefore, instead of majoring on the application of what is learned from Scripture, believers are constantly clamoring about for some new angel that will give them a “deeper understanding” of the gospel that saved them.

Sixth: Christ and the apostles clearly warned that such doctrines would constantly trouble the church until the return of Christ, and in fact has been the primary nemesis of God’s people throughout redemptive history.

Seventh: All hope in contending against this doctrine is lost if one focuses on all of the theological systems and theories that attempt to make it plausible. This harkens back to lessons learned in contending against first century Gnosticism. For example, as mentioned in chapter five, New Covenant Theology alone has eighty elements. Presently, that is.

Therefore, the goal is to focus on the doctrines reductionist premise, and compare that with the truth of God’s word. The rest that pleads the doctrine’s case cannot be true if the premise isn’t true—regardless of its orthodox-like garb.

In this history section, some doctrine is being observed to show historical relevance, and that will be the case in this chapter as well. In chapter seven, we observed Sonship Theology’s historical connection to New Calvinism. In this chapter we will glean what there is to learn in a contrasting movement that took place during the rise of New Calvinism. Why did these two movements clash? If the other movement contradicted New Calvinism, and it certainly did, what can be learned about new Calvinism and its doctrine by contrast?

The contrary movement was what we will aptly call the “Doing Reformation.” It started with Dr. Jay Adams. Powlison commented on the movement in the aforementioned message at Piper’s church (chapter 8) and it will be borrowed again:

I think that in the first generation of biblical counseling, which would be initiated by Jay Adams, probably the landmark book, 1970, Competent to Counsel, that’s where the title of my dissertation came, that Adams had certain – Adams certainly articulated those three core commitments about the nature of the scripture, the nature of ministry, the nature of the church.  And Adams says certain things that no one in the counseling world was saying, the notion that the Bible spoke and that God engaged all of life, the notion that God is our environment.  We live in His world.  History plays His themes, that whatever is going on with people always is touching, butting against, conforming to, arguing with God, either suppressing the knowledge of God, or delighting in the knowledge of God.  That sense of a God who is sovereign and of a God whose word speaks into human life a great strength.

Adams had, and again, this is one of the distinctives of his system, real strong sense of what – and he took the language, Paul’s language of the putting off and the putting on, putting off with the old man, the old nature, the putting on of the new.  And again, credit him in this.  Instead of talking in generalities, he actually gave a counseling method, ask questions.  Don’t just talk about sin.  Find out where this couple that is in intense conflict, where are they struggling, what happens, when is it, what does he say to her, what does she say to him, what are the attitudes, where are the breakdowns happening.  So those are – there was the initiation of some kind of counseling process that was put in there that invited a pastor, invited a Christian lay person, a chaplain, whoever, to actually have reason to talk for more than one hour with a person, get to know people, find out where they’re really at.  Don’t just give them platitudes.  Get to know them.  Find out the information, and don’t just tell people, well, you should love your wife.  Help a husband wrestle through how do I love – in the power of God, how am I to love this wife, the one I have?  ‘Cause I know the way that my wife is loved is different from the way that Jack’s wife is loved, or the way that anyone else’s wife here is loved, and so forth and so on.  Children are different, wives are different, husbands are different.  And so wrestle through the specifics.

Though Powlison puts his own biased twist on this historical account, some of it is useful. Jay Adams is known as the father of the contemporary biblical counseling movement and rightfully so. In a nutshell, while New Calvinists like to talk about “intelligent repentance,” ie., a complex, deep introspection into the soul to find heart idols for the purpose of reorienting our desires, Adams was all about intelligent obedience.

No thanks to the first gospel wave started by Billy Graham in the fifties, diligent and intelligent application of God’s wisdom in sanctification was eclipsed by the supposed priority of getting people saved. Missing the simplicity of Christ’s mandate to the church, we began making “saved” people and not disciples.61 So obsessed was the church with making saved people, they would not pass on the opportunity to look for them among the saved, ignoring the second part of Christ’s mandate to “go.” Hence, the alter call. The primary goal of Sunday church was not “encouraging each other unto good works,”62 but seeing people walk forward to rededicate or give their lives to Christ. Psychology filled the void, leading to a pushback by Dave Hunt and his book The Seduction of Christianity. Hunt brought attention to the problem but offered no solution or alternative to the idea that Sigmund Freud was smarter than God. However, Adams did. Adams understood Christ’s mandate: make disciples—“teaching them to observe all that I have commanded.”

Powlison is right on this wise: Christians were trying to function on biblical “generalities.” But also, Adams has been known to comment that as he traveled about the country speaking in churches, people were shocked to hear that they could “do something” in the sanctification process; and concerning trouble in life as well in addition to praying about it. Adams devised a biblical counseling method, and as many pastors who ascribed to it will attest, when counselees were asked what they had done about their problem, it was almost always one of three responses: they had prayed about it only; nothing; or something other than biblical. Christianity en masse was ignorant in regard to thinking biblically, and certainly ignorant of right biblical doing if they were doing anything at all other than praying about it. And pray they did because it was the pastor’s replacement for counseling. The extent of counseling was the following advice: “Pray and go to the Psychologist.”

The church seemed tone-deaf to the fact that few people were willing to entrust their souls to a God that didn’t even know how to save their marriages. The Adams reformation changed that in a big way. In training centers across the United States, pastors who had been in the ministry for thirty-years were heard saying, “Where has this teaching been all of my life? Ok, this makes sense; the God who created us should certainly know how to fix us!” Adams brought theology down to real life; hence, many Calvinist were heard saying, “Oh, I get it; God is not only sovereign in salvation—he is sovereign in my life difficulties as well!” The organization that primarily advocated what Adams taught was the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors, or NANC. The astonishing revelation/news that Spirit filled believers could use the God-breathed Scriptures to help people spread fast—especially in the early nineties. The revival was on, but all was not well.

CCEF (chapter 8) and NANC were seen as the two major biblical counseling organizations driving the movement. The organizations also shared board members—and different perspectives on the gospel. According to a source that will remain unnamed, Paul David Tripp complained that Adams was not “vertical enough.” That is a valuable statement because one of the major suppositions of this book is that a proper balance of the vertical (God’s work) and the horizontal (our work) is critical to the Christian life and testimony. Why? Because the primary conduit in consideration is the law. Christ did not even speak of those who openly indulge in sin so that grace can supposedly abound, he spoke of those who merely “relax(es)” the law and teach others to do the same,63 and that regarding the “least” of all His commandments. To say that Sonship Theology has a relaxed attitude towards the law would by a gargantuan understatement. The crux of the matter can be further ascertained from Powlison’s message at Piper’s church as mentioned before:

This might be quite a controversy, but I think it’s worth putting in.  Adams had a tendency to make the cross be for conversion.  And the Holy Spirit was for sanctification.  And actually even came out and attacked my mentor, Jack Miller, my pastor that I’ve been speaking of through the day, for saying that Christians should preach the gospel to themselves.  I think Jay was wrong on that.  I – it’s one of those places where I read Ephesians.  I read Galatians.  I read Romans.  I read the gospels themselves.  I read the Psalms.  And the grace of God is just at every turn, and these are written for Christians.  I think it’s a place where Jay’s fear of pietism, like his fear of speculation, psychologically actually kept him from tapping into just a rich sense of the vertical dimension.  And I think Biblical Counseling as a movement, capital B, capital C, has been on a trajectory where the filling in of some of these neglected parts of the puzzle has led to an approach to counseling that is more mature, more balanced.  It’s wiser.  It has more continuity with the church historically in its wisest pastoral exemplars.64

At the core of a longstanding contention between Jay Adams and the CCEF clan, and later NANC also because of CCEF influence, was disagreement on the gospel. The distinction cannot be clearer—Adams believes that the gospel is for salvation, and then we move on in making disciples by teaching them to observe the whole counsel of God. Powlison, according to Westminster’s version of the Forum’s centrality of the objective gospel which is Sonship Theology, believes the same gospel that saved us also sanctifies us. Powlison also mentioned the phrase that Miller coined that is the motto of contemporary New Calvinism: We must preach the gospel to ourselves every day. Powlison then shared why he thought Adams missed the boat on the right approach to helping people:

 I think there’s been a huge growth in the movement in the understanding of the human heart, which is really a way of saying of the vertical dimension.  And I had an interesting conversation with Jay Adams, probably 20 years ago when I said, why don’t you deal with the inner man?  Where’s the conscience?  Where’s the desires?  Where’s the fears?  Where’s the hopes?  Why don’t you talk about those organizing, motivating patterns?

And his answer was actually quite interesting. He said, “when I started biblical counseling, I read every book I could from psychologists, liberals, liberal mainline pastoral theologians. There weren’t any conservatives to speak of who talked about counseling.  And they all seemed so speculative about the area of motivation.  I didn’t want to speculate, and so I didn’t want to say what I wasn’t sure was so.

One thing I knew, obviously there’s things going on inside people.  What’s going on inside and what comes out are clearly connected cause it’s a whole person, so I focused on what I could see.”

In other words, if Powlison quoted him accurately, Adams didn’t want to try to help people with anything that was speculative. This is antithetical to Powlison’s approach. CCEF’s research and development department devises theories and then experiments with them in local churches. An example of this would be Paul David Tripp’s treatise on Powlison’s Dynamics of Biblical Change, How People Change. The material was tested in several churches to apparently ascertain response. In one church, the material was tested in a Sunday School class and the leader’s guide stated the following in “Acknowledgments”:

We want to offer a special word of appreciation to all the churches around the country that were willing to test this course. Your contribution is invaluable. You have challenged and encouraged us and helped sharpen the curriculum.65

Though the leadership of that church and the elder in particular that taught the class knew a certain ladies husband would disapprove of sanctification by justification, he allowed her into the class while her husband was in the middle of another study elsewhere. He knowingly taught her the material behind her husband’s back. This kind of arrogant mentality is commonplace in the movement—the elder assumed he knew what was best for the man’s wife. Also troubling is the idea that biblical truth must be tested as opposed to the belief that conclusive truth can be drawn from Scripture by proper exegesis. Powlison’s nebulous approach to truth can be seen in further comments he made concerning Adams in the same presentation:

And that notion that the active verbs with respect to God can do multiple duty for us, they not only call us to faith and love and refuge and hope, but they can turn on their heads and they become questions, what am I hoping in, where am I taking refuge, what am I loving that is not God, that that’s actually a hugely significant component, both of self-knowledge and then of repentance as well.

Emphasis on the positive side of the heart is the whole relationship with God.  And I do think that’s a way where, in the first generation, it looks pretty behavioral, and the whole vividness of relationship with God.66

Throughout the presentation, Powlison refers to the “first generation” of biblical counseling as opposed to the second generation of which he fathered through his program that is the criteria for counseling training at Westminster seminary: The Dynamics of Biblical Change. What that program is based on couldn’t be clearer: gospel reductionist theology with its dual clarion calls of  “We must preach the gospel to ourselves every day” and “The same gospel that saved you also sanctified you.” The basis of this theology can be seen clearly in how counseling is practiced by these two organizations; the primary thrust is to wow the counselee with the glory of the gospel. All change must come through the objective gospel outside of us and everything must be interpreted through that reality. That’s how Paul Tripp can present change of thinking as an outside-of-the-cup procedure—because the believer is initiating the change and all change must come through the observation of the outside gospel first. This is one of the tenets of New Covenant Theology as well as articulated by New Covenant Theology guru Chad Bresson. Point number one of his eighty tenets is the following:

New Covenant Theology insists on the priority of Jesus Christ over all things, including history, revelation, and redemption. New Covenant Theology presumes a Christocentricity to the understanding and meaning of all reality.

It all harkens back to the sevenfold thesis of this book. Sonship theology is based on the Forum’s centrality of the objective gospel outside of us with the goal of reducing the believer’s role to the least common denominator. Powlison, who perhaps has never even heard of the Forum, applied that theological principle to counseling because the concept was passed on to him through John Miller’s Sonship Theology. Miller was infused with the concept because at the time of his tenure, Westminster was saturated with the doctrine (see chapter 6)—even to the point of the Westminster faculty inviting the Forum for a visit to Westminster (regardless of their SDA connections) while holding their noses and serving them pork at the behest of Jay Adams.

This brings us to point five of this book’s thesis:

While reductionist theologies seek to reduce the believer’s role to the least common denominator, supposedly to make much of God and little of man, the elements that attempt to make it seem plausible are often complex and ongoing.

Tripp’s How People Change is the articulation of how this overly vertical doctrine supposedly works in the real life of spiritual growth. Of course, it would seem that proponents argue that it is impossible to be overly vertical. But let there be no doubt: the crux of the contention between first generation biblical counseling and the second generation of the supposed same is a question of balance between the horizontal and the vertical. Adams prefers to focus on what we can ascertain with certainty because people’s lives hang in the balance. Powlison prefers to “push the envelope” and test theories of change continually expedited by CCEF’s “research and development department” that he is so proud of.  This is necessary for purposes of finding more and more data as to why we should preach the gospel to ourselves and how that reductionist concept supposedly works in real life. Powlison has no qualms whatsoever in testing those theories on people’s lives.

We are not only in the second generation of biblical counseling, but we are also in the second gospel wave. The first gospel wave treated sanctification as unimportant and a distraction from “getting people saved.” The second gospel wave we are in now states that it is not only unimportant, but that it is completely irrelevant because it is really justification to begin with. Adams corrected the problems of the first wave and everyone agrees that it was a reformation and the beginning of the biblical counseling movement, but now the second generation wants to usher in another form of the first gospel wave while persecuting the cure to the latter.

And the result is not enough gospel for the lost. Too little questioning about the hope that is in us because we are still at the foot of Christ’s cross and not picking up our own and walking forward. Too much gospel in the wrong place.