Folks in my circles need to have a serious talk about "biblical counseling."

There are two unhelpful extremes it seems to me. On the one hand, certain students of BC have a kind of radicalized view of it, where psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry are seen as impermissible "secular" challenges to biblical sufficiency. Not always the case but often?

On the other hand, some overreact to this and tend to reduce all of our emotional/behavioral problems to the category of "mental health" with insufficient attention paid to biblical categories.

On the one hand, we are mind-body unities and should welcome the truth about our human condition wherever it is found. On the other hand, we need to admit that we live in an age characterized by the "triumph of the therapeutic" (as Reiff put it).

On the one hand, psychotropic medicines help many. On the other, we our culture is overmedicated in many ways.*

*Disclaimer: this is NOT medical advice. Talk to your physician about all of those issues.

Part of the problem is how partisan these conversations become. "I am a biblical counselor/integrationist/Christian psychologist/etc." That was my experience in seminary, at least as I heard it. This is our "team" and it's opposed to all those other teams.

Part of what helped me move beyond this party spirit was working at Christian universities where "integration" wasn't a swearword but a watchword, places where there are trained psychologists who take both their faith and their science seriously.

All truth is God's truth and all truth is hidden in Christ. Both of those are true. Our approach to these issues should account for both.