On most accounts, the Biblical Counseling movement began with the writings of Jay Adams (1929-2020) in the 1960s, and was continued by authors such as David Powlison and Ed Welch. Already in the writings of Adams, and later in the writings of Powlison, we find an antipathy towards the psychoanalysis developed by Freud and his followers. As Todd Morikawa recently suggested, though Biblical Counselors do not reject some observations made by modern psychologists, they do reject the interpretation they give to these observations, and the overall assumptions that underlie their grandiose claims. In his 2016 book, A Theology of Biblical Counseling: The Doctrinal Foundations of Counseling Ministry, Heath Lambert portrays general revelation as God’s revelation of himself to fallen humanity, such that men are made to be without excuse, and suggests that Common Grace is the basis upon which an unbelieving psychologist acquires knowledge of human nature and psychology. Upon this basis, Lambert criticizes the approach of “Integrationalists,” such as Larry Crabb, who find, in the reality of common grace and general revelation, an excuse to mine the givings of secular psychologists for diamonds to be used in counseling Christians.
It is the contention of this paper, that Biblical Counselors such as Lambert, Morikawa, and Adams, in attempting to correct an extreme that they claim to have observed in Christian “integrationalists” such as Crabb, have misunderstood the nature of Nature—of Reality and man’s place within it, and of man’s ability to know such truths—and, in so doing, they have prematurely discarded the givings of unbelieving scholars in relation to human nature, human actions, human motivations, and how to pastorally guide believers in sanctification through counseling. To support our contention, we will show how Biblical Counselors have tended to discuss the nature and role of Natural Theology, Natural Law, natural knowledge, and where the confusion enters in. We will then suggest, appealing to the early Reformed use of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, that the approach of biblical counseling can be supported and refined by appeal to philosophical anthropology and natural law theory.