“Biblical Counseling and secular psychology: they haven’t always been the best of friends. That’s putting it mildly, and it makes sense if you think about it. The Biblical Counseling movement was founded in large part as a reaction to the church giving up on pastoral care, or at least a depth of pastoral care. And so, as a movement, the Biblical Counseling world has tended to be known for the ways that we’ve critiqued secular psychologies. We’ve pointed to how the fact that it’s operating out of a non-Christian worldview has massive influence on all of the things that it concludes and even the things that it observes. I think we do have real and fundamental points of disagreement, and I’m glad for us to have highlighted them, I think that has been an important service. However, Biblical counselors have always maintained that there is much we can learn from secular psychology. We just haven’t always talked very much about it. So what I’d like to do, and today’s episode being the first one, is start a series of podcasts I’m calling ‘The Best of Psychology,’ where we think about what we as biblical counselors have learned, even where we may have changed and modified what is going on in psychology, seeing how it serves us, and what we can do with it.” Host, Alasdair Groves speaks with Mike Emlet about what he has learned from secular psychology.
This is part 1 of a 3 part series: Part 2 | Part 3
Length: 21:28
Additional Resources Available: What’s in a Name? Understanding Psychiatric Diagnoses
As Christians, it can be hard to know what to think about the diagnoses the mental health world uses to describe troubled people. Are they useless because they are based on a secular view of mankind? Or are they helpful because they offer researched and detailed descriptions of common problems? Dr. Emlet offers a biblically informed perspective for our ministry that helps us to be neither “too cold” nor “too warm” toward these classifications.