Critique of Biblical Counseling Foundation's Instruction Course: Part 1

When I began to read more and more about nouthetic counseling and its strict brand of thought on psychology and other matters of the brain, it became easy to find its many fallacies.

I have been studying an instruction book intended to train novice counselors in the self-confrontational method of nouthetic counseling. The book is published by the Biblical Counseling Foundation.

Chapter 3 of the book, which is entitled Course I Instructor’s Guide: For the 24 Week Self-Confrontation Course, is devoted to making distinctions between “God’s way” and “man’s way.”

Here is a short excerpt:

The Scriptures were written for the express purpose of showing us how to face, deal with, and endure every problem in life. This includes physical problems and even the very serious so-called mental problems of today. While the Lord normally uses medical doctors to treat physical problems, He uses the Scriptures to provide guidance on how to act and have joy in the midst of each problem.

For example, even though a broken arm needs to be treated medically, the Lord provides us guidance in His Word and strength through the Holy Spirit to act biblically in the midst of the pain. In the same way, when a person’s mental capacity is altered due to an impaired brain the Lord may use a medical doctor to treat the physical impairment, but He holds every person responsible for moral choices. A person with defective thinking may understand little, but he can still choose to be loving or unloving. God tells us in His Word that He will judge every person for every moral deed (based on Ecclesiastes 12:13-14; Romans 2:5-6). (43)

My beef with this excerpt lies in the statement: but he can still choose to be loving or unloving.

Imagine, if you can, an 80 year old woman who has rarely raised her voice to her loved ones, is a regular church attendee and volunteer, who has read and memorized scripture, and who has been a servant of God for most of her life. She has Alzheimer’s. Suddenly, and to her family’s dismay and horror, she begins acting in ways she HAS NEVER acted before in her life. She says hurtful, cruel things. Sometimes she shouts obscenities. Sometimes she throws objects across the room, even at people. She becomes a seemingly different person.

She has Alzheimer’s. Her mind is fading; it is broken.

Does she have a choice in her behavior? Are we to condemn her for choosing to be unloving?

And suddenly, things aren’t so black and white. Perhaps, just perhaps, there’s a little bit of room for lenience, even tolerance. And it is here where can be eternally thankful that God’s grace washes away the sinful aspects of this fallen world and we can rest assured that despite this undesirable behavior, this woman will soon have a restored body in heaven.

I think this book makes false and dangerous statements. Confronting this woman with scripture is not going to heal her broken mind. And this is when God’s grace is all her family has to hold onto. Which, of course, means that there is more to a relationship with God than just our adherence to scriptures. There is the Holy Spirit, who resides within us once we are saved, who guides us and helps us discern the right ways to address illness, whether it be physical OR mental.

Eph. 2:8 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God –”