LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
The Inerrancy Debate and Counseling
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (Ed. D) Department of Christian Leadership and
Church Ministries
By
Mary Gracias
Lynchburg, Virginia
10/2022
The Inerrancy Debate and Counseling
The vast majority of Fundamentalists and Evangelicals alike hold to a belief in the inerrancy
of the Scriptures in their original autographs as the proper view of biblical inspiration. Most
conservatives base their position on the teaching of the Scripture itself and trace the
formulation of the plenary-verbal inspiration concept to the crystalization of that position by
Warfield and the Princeton theologians of the nineteenth century. To Fundamentalists, the
inerrancy of Scripture is ultimately linked to the legitimacy and authority of the
Bible. We view the Bible as being God-breathed and thus free from error in all its
statements and affirmations. However, today there is a debate raging within Evangelical circles
regarding the total inerrancy of the Scriptures.
I. The Inerrancy Debate
The recent and explosive evaluation of the left-wing Evangelical capitulation to limited
errancy by Harold Lindsell has raised strong objections to the drift away from inerrancy by
many whose historical roots go back to the birth of Fundamentalism. In commenting on this
drift within Evangelicalism from another perspective, Richard Quebedeaux observes that the
old concepts of infallibility and inerrancy are being reinterpreted to the point that a number of
Evangelical scholars are saying that the teaching of scripture, rather than the text, is without
error. Some have gone so far as to recognize and even categorize the marks of cultural
conditioning on Scripture. It is the latter issue which has such strong implication in relation to
the use of scripture in counseling.
In current European theology we are told that truth is “near at hand in the Bible and yet
will remain relatively hidden to us.” The Bible is “inspired” only in that in its human story we
experience the Word of God as God, in a paradoxical manner, “speaks” to us through this
volume of human writings. Thus, the ultimate issue of the truth of Scripture rests upon the
subjective experience of the believer. The “Word of God” within the Bible becomes a “canon
within a canon” and eventually contemporary theologians become reluctant to define what
biblical content is in fact the “Word of God.” This leaves the biblical counselor with no absolute
standard by which to minister God’s truth to people. Thus, it is not surprising to notice that the
word “Scripture” does not even appear in several recent works on “Christian Psychology.”
II. Counseling and the Inspiration of Scripture
Have you ever tried to sell or promote something in which you did not really believe? It is a
miserable experience! The salesman who has no confidence in his product will reluctantly
knock on your door, hoping no one will answer. The same is true of the pastor who has no real
confidence in the Bible or his ability to apply its truth to the lives of his people. When the
counselee calls for help, he will think up an excuse to avoid answering him, or slip out the side
door of the study while his secretary stalls the distressed soul in the outer office.
While engaged in a revival crusade in a large metropolitan city a few years ago, a dejected
pastor came to me after a service and said,
“It all seems so empty.” “What does?” I asked. He went on to explain that he had visited
someone in the hospital that day and after listening to the person’s tale of trouble, he replied
(holding up his Bible), “God has the answer.” He felt like he was deceiving people, merely
repeating an empty epithet or a corny cliche. “It just isn’t enough,” he muttered. “There must
be something more I could have said.”
“Of course,” I responded, “there is much more that you could have said!” What was
wrong? He believed the Bible, but he did not use it. “What concepts did you teach her? What
verses did you give her? What principles did you develop from the Scripture that applied to her
problem?” I asked. Why was he so dejected? Because he had failed as a minister and as a
counselor. He lost confidence in his results because he had no method. That woman needed to
be reminded of God’s sovereignty over sickness and his desire to teach and comfort her during
this time (cf. 2 Cor 1:3–7). She needed to see this time as a meaningful, though difficult,
experience in her life. She needed truth and he gave her half-truth. The effective Christian
counselor cannot merely wave the Bible over people as if it were a magic wand. He must open
it and explain and apply its truths to the soul in need.
A. Thy Word is Truth: Confidence in the Message
In Harold Lindsell’s important and controversial book, The Battle for the Bible, he raises the
question of the trustworthiness of Scripture. “Is the Bible a reliable guide to religious
knowledge?” he asks. If it is, then the minister of God has every reason to hold tenaciously to
its truths above the prevalent opinion of his contemporaries. Nearly every major school of
thought in philosophy
and psychology rejects the authority of the Bible. Therefore, it is virtually impossible and
epistemologically disastrous to attempt a merger between biblical truths and anti-biblical
concepts. This is clearly evident among those who have attempted to integrate liberalism and
orthodoxy in theology.
The pastor as a Christian counselor stands in a unique position, having been equipped with
a manual of instruction. All genuine biblical counseling presupposes the reliability of that book.
Apart from the message of God’s truth, Charles Ping is right when he refers to religious
language as “meaningful nonsense.” The minister of that word is more than an integrator of
psychology and religion; he is the interpreter and applicator of that word. Therefore, all of his
theological studies and their practical application rest upon his view of the Bible.
Edward J. Young raised the issue of the dependability of Scripture and related it to applied
theology when he warned: “If, therefore, the Church today takes the wrong turning and finds
herself in the land of despair and doubt, she has not harkened to the Guidebook, but has
allowed herself to be deceived by signposts with which her enemy has tampered.”
John Warwick Montgomery has analyzed the modern preacher from the archetype of Rev.
Eccles in John Updike’s novel, Rabbit, Run, where the minister feels deeply the needs of
frustrated modern man, but is totally incapable of meeting those needs because he has no
authoritative word of judgment or grace to offer him. Certainly such a biblically impoverished
ecclesiastic has little real help to offer those with real problems. Thus, the ultimate origin of the
erroneous idea that the pastor is not qualified to counsel has arisen from a theological lack of
confidence in the power of Scripture. This leaves the so-called minister a victim of professional
secular psychologists as his only course of help. The pastor’s escape from responsibility is: “See
a psychiatrist.” The psychiatrist’s escape from responsibility is: “See a pharmacist.”
The Bible itself claims to be a divine message from God. It is not “the” truth; it is truth! All
truth may not be in the Bible, but all that is in the Bible is true. The Bible itself is the standard of
what is in fact true. Jesus himself prayed, “Sanctify them through thy word: thy word is truth”
(John 17:17). He proclaimed that his words were not his own, “but the Father’s which sent me”
(John 14:24). The psalmist sang, “The words of the Lord are pure words as silver tried in a
furnace of earth, purified seven times” (Ps 12:6). The Apostle Paul wrote: “…but as it is in truth,
the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe” (1 Thess 2:13). That the
Scriptures claim to be, and that Jesus Christ believed them to be, the infallible revelation of God
is a matter beyond dispute.
The Bible is indispensable in our knowledge of God and of his will. Young urged: “A return
to the Bible is the greatest need of our day…unless the church is willing to hear the Word of
God, she will soon cease to be the church of the living God.”
B. Thy Word Works: Confidence in Counseling
If the Bible is the inspired word of God, then it will prove to be so in that it fulfills its claims
and promises. I once sat next to a young college student on a flight from Indianapolis to Detroit.
We began talking about religion and the Bible. After listening to the claims of Scripture, he
asked, “But how do you know for sure that the Bible is true?” I explained that if he took a
course in chemistry and the textbook claimed that the mixture of two chemicals would produce
a certain result, he could only prove that for certain by personal experimentation. “How could
you know the book was correct?” I asked. “When I did what it said,” he replied, “it would
work.” “That is exactly how you can know that the Bible is true,” I announced. “When you do
what it says, it works!”
The Bible, I further explained, tells me about a Person who can change my life by faith in
him alone. When I did what the Book said, I experienced exactly what it claimed I would: the
assurance of eternal life and the forgiveness of sin.
Not only does the Bible claim to prepare men for heaven but for life on earth as well. The
significance of the Sermon on the Mount is that it is a spiritual message designed to equip man
to live on earth. This is also emphasized in the well-known passage from Paul: “All scripture is
given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all
good works” (2 Tim 3:16–17). The “man of God” in the context is the minister of God’s word. He
has been fully equipped by that word to teach, reprove, correct, and instruct the people of God.
The Christian counselor must operate in the confidence that the Bible works because it is truth.
It is exactly in this regard that Jay Adams has challenged self-styled “Christian counseling”
which wants the Bible as a “tack-on” to its ideas, but not as the sole foundation of its
methodology. It is with complete confidence that God has designed the Scriptures to speak to
the inner emotional and spiritual needs of man that this article has been prepared to apply a
specific body of Scripture to those needs through the means of nouthetic counseling.
For Adams, the use of Scripture in counseling involves an interaction of five essential
factors:
1. A biblical understanding of the counselee’s problem, from…
2. A clear understanding of the Holy Spirit’s telos in scriptural passages appropriate to both
the problem and the solution, and…
3. A meeting of man’s problem and God’s full solution in counseling, according to…
4. The formulation of a biblical plan of action, leading toward…
5. Commitment to scriptural action by the counselee.
Nouthetic counseling requires a prior knowledge of Scripture on the part of the counselor.
He must be “thoroughly furnished” in order to teach, reprove, correct, and instruct the
counselee. It is the fear that the Bible does not have the answer to the problem that forces
many pastoral couselors to abandon it in favor of some other approach. This practice must be
stopped before the pastoral counselor finds himself adrift in a maelstrom of conflict and
confusion.
Most non-Christian and non-biblical counseling errs on the very first point of Adams’s
scheme. It fails to understand the counselee’s problem biblically and hence is able neither to
diagnose it adequately nor to treat it effectively. The basic understanding of man is essential to
one’s personality theory and method of therapy. Thus, the use of Scripture in nouthetic
counseling could just as easily be called “Bible therapy”!
As the counselor studies the principles of the Bible, the Holy Spirit is building a reserve
bank of divine truth from which he may draw during the counseling process. The counselee also
has the opportunity to learn from these truths himself as he studies and applies his
“homework” assignment in Scripture.
Nouthetic counseling is really Christian or biblical counseling. Adams has emphasized the
word “nouthetic” simply to distinguish a system of biblically oriented counseling in contrast to
semi-secularized, quasi-christianized, so-called Christian counseling. Nouthetic counseling takes
seriously the biblical commands to “admonish,” “teach,” “exhort,” “reprove,” “correct,”
“instruct.” The Greek word νουθήσις focuses upon confrontation of the client by the counselor,
with the aim of bringing about repentant change of behavior. The fundamental
purpose of nouthetic confrontation is to effect personality and character change by the
power of the Holy Spirit using the inspired Word of God to speak through the counselor to the
counselee. Nouthetic counseling is an applied confrontation with the inspired truths and
principles of Scripture.
III. Counseling and Cultural Contextualization
Probably the most crucial issue of the inerrancy debate relating to the area of Christian
counseling is the attempt of the so-called “Biblical Feminists” to discount the implications of
scriptural statements regarding the male-female relationship as it is defined in the Bible. Thus,
the “Biblical feminists” encourage a hermeneutic of “deculturization,” arguing that one cannot
“absolutize the culture in which the Bible was written.” Hence, the “cultural contamination” of
the biblical writers leaves their statements open to reinterpretation in light of a different
culture which exists today. That which is judged to be culturally conditioned is then rejected as
“not binding” on today’s believer.
A. Cultural Discrepancies
While Jewett affirms the “inspiration” of Scripture, he definitely allows for some
discrepancy between God’s eternal “Word” and the words of the biblical writers. In wrestling
with the apparent contradictions between what he views as the biblical view of women and St.
Paul’s emphasis upon female submission, Jewett concludes that Paul’s human limitations
dominate in the passages that teach female subordination.
In her evaluation of their position Susan Foh states:
To summarize, the biblical feminists see irreconcilable contradictions in the Bible’s teaching
on women. These contradictions are resolved by acknowledging that the Bible reflects human
limitations. The culture in biblical times was patriarchal, and the men who wrote the Bible were
inextricably influenced by their culture… Therefore, the biblical feminists reason, we must
remove cultural elements from the Bible to recover God’s truth; we must deculturize the Bible.
Thus, the “Biblical Feminists” actually carry Barth’s exposition of Eph 5:21–33 even further
than he intended by advocating a total reversability of male/female roles. The more liberal
“Christian Feminists” go further yet, denying the legitimacy of any sexual identity and
advocating a non-divine, fallible Christ.
In the realm of Christian counseling, such an approach to the authority and meaning of
Scripture becomes ludicrous. The Biblical statements may be flatly rejected as being
propositional and may be reinterpreted solely in the light of one’s contemporary culture. Thus,
culture, not the Scripture, becomes the ultimate authority in one’s life. However, a sound
exegesis of biblical passages reveals just the opposite! The Scripture consistently speaks against
the culture of its day. Therefore, it is tragic to see the unwitting capitulation of writers such as
Helen Beard who adopt Jewett’s reasoning as an excuse for “elevating” women beyond the
“limitations of culturally-conditioned” Scripture in order to free them for a more “positive
ministry.”
An honest study of the Scripture would never raise such issues as marital role reversal or
the ordination of women. These have arisen within certain Christian circles only because they
are related to issues in the wider secular culture. The Church has always stood uniquely in her
non-conformity to culture. She has had to place revelation over culture in order to determine
God’s sure word of direction in moral and ethical issues. Like the first-century church, we dare
not base our Christian ethics upon a fallible contemporary culture but upon the unchanging
principles of God’s inerrant word.
