This article was previously published at the Biblical Counseling Coalition. The original post can be viewed here.
There are many ways to analyze a Christian movement. One can look at its main leaders, its core ideas, its contributions, or its broader impact upon the church. Every movement also has a history, including the biblical counseling movement. There have only been a few books which have addressed the history of biblical counseling,1 and the historical roots of biblical counseling remain a rich area of potential research.
When biblical counselors have searched for the historical roots of biblical counseling, they often investigate the past for examples that look like biblical counseling: a Christian (usually a pastor) with a Bible offering counsel about a particular aspect of life to another person. Thus, it makes sense that many people have drawn connections between biblical counseling and groups such as the Puritans or the Reformers, people committed to the ministry of the Word.2 Nevertheless, similarities are not sufficient in themselves to establish historical connections.
While biblical counselors have much to learn from church history about the practices of counseling and soul care, the biblical counseling movement itself has a clear historical connection. It is the unconventional yet indisputable reality that the closest theological discipline to the biblical counseling movement is not pastoral ministry, nor psychology, nor counseling, but apologetics, due to the biblical counseling movement’s unlikely godfather, Cornelius Van Til.
The Historical Context of Biblical Counseling
Traditionally, a godfather plays an important role in a person’s life. He is there at the beginning of life, later maintaining a distant—often absent—but influential role in a person’s development. That role accurately describes Cornelius Van Til’s relationship to biblical counseling. As the story goes, the young Jay Adams was a pastor within conservative Presbyterian churches in the aftermath of the defenestration (a great word!) of conservative leaders and pastors from the mainline denominations in the early twentieth century. Leaders such as J. Gresham Machen left their churches in protest of the modernist drift within these denominations.
In the 1960s, Jay Adams, who recently finished his PhD in Speech from the University of Missouri, received the opportunity to lecture in the pastoral ministry courses at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, PA. Launched in 1929 by Machen himself, Westminster stood alone as one of the leading conservative and reformed seminaries throughout the middle of the twentieth century. Westminster sought to uphold the tradition of Old Princeton while training the next generation of ministers who would influence the American church to this day, with graduates of Westminster including leaders such as Francis Schaeffer, John Frame, Timothy Keller, as well as many of the current leaders of the modern biblical counseling movement.
Part of Adams’ responsibilities at Westminster included the seminary’s lone counseling class. Unable to find biblical resources for counseling, Adams went rogue, seeking to rethink the counseling task according to Scripture. Adams also drew upon the knowledge of his fellow faculty member, Cornelius Van Til. Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) was a Dutch theologian and philosopher who devoted himself to the task of apologetics. In the decade before the first World War, Van Til’s family emigrated from the Netherlands to the immigrant communities of the American Midwest when he was ten years old.
As a young student, Van Til was enamored with the theological heroes of the Dutch tradition, including Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. Later in life, he became good friends with fellow Dutch immigrant, Geerhardus Vos, when he dual-enrolled at Princeton Seminary and University. Van Til watched Machen stand before the liberal tides within the PCUSA and Princeton Seminary. Van Til’s time at Princeton also exposed the young scholar to the theological giants of the Old Princeton tradition—Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and B. B. Warfield. Later at Westminster, Van Til would combine the two theological tributaries of Old Princeton and Old Amsterdam into his own form of Reformed apologetics, commonly known today as presuppositional apologetics.
Biblical Counseling’s Birth Certificate
In the introduction to Competent to Counsel, Jay Adams waves his own Van Tilian flag to his readers, signaling his indebtedness to the Dutch philosopher when he describes the method of his book as “presuppositional.” In a footnote, he explains,
“Dr. Cornelius Van Til, of Westminster Theological Seminary, has shown the importance of presuppositional analysis. He has demonstrated that at bottom, all non-Christian systems demand autonomy for man, thereby seeking to dethrone God.”3
In many ways, Adams adapts his “playbook” for engaging with other counseling methodologies from Van Til. As Van Til’s apologetic focuses on analyzing the presuppositions of Christians and non-Christians in arguing for belief in God, Adams sought to expose the naturalistic worldview foundations of many secular counseling systems. As Van Til argues against “autonomous reasoning” (human reasoning without reference to God which elevates the rational abilities of man), Adams observes that many secular counseling systems believe that man can solve his own problems by himself apart from God and without reference to the gospel.
In Competent to Counsel, Jay Adams reveals that Cornelius Van Til was there at the birth of the biblical counseling movement, and his presence and influence has remained with the movement to this day. In a podcast interview from 2011, David Powlison comments that “from a deep structure standpoint, [biblical counseling] is Van Tilian utterly, from beginning to end.”4 Exploring the relationship between Cornelius Van Til and Jay Adams may prove to be the key to unlocking the past, the present, and the future of the biblical counseling movement.
- See David Powlison, The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2010); Heath Lambert, The Biblical Counseling Movement after Adams (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012); Jay E. Adams, “Reflections on the History of Biblical Counseling,” in Practical Theology and the Ministry of the Church, 1952-1984: Essays in Honor of Edmund P. Clowney, ed. Harvie M. Conn (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1990), 203–17; David Powlison, “Integration or Inundation?,” in Power Religion: The Selling out of the Evangelical Church? (Chicago: Moody Press, 1992). ↩︎
- Examples here include Bob Kellemen, Counseling Under the Cross: How Martin Luther Applied the Gospel to Daily Life (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2017); Timothy J Keller, “Puritan Resources for Biblical Counseling,” Journal of Pastoral Practice 9, no. 3 (1988): 11–44; Stuart W. Scott, “More Than Preachers: Solas and Soul-Care of the Reformers,” The Journal of Biblical Soul Care 1, no. 1 (2017): 56–74. ↩︎
- Jay E. Adams, Competent to Counsel: Introduction to Nouthetic Counseling (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970), xxin1. ↩︎
- Reformed Forum, “Business Ethics, Pastoral Searches, and Van Til as Biblical Counselor,” Christ the Center, accessed August 29, 2023, https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc173/. ↩︎
