What is Christian Counseling, anyway? A review

Today I’m going to start a careful review of a new book by H. Newton Malony and David Augsburger entitled, Christian Counseling: An introduction (Abingdon Press, 2007). Malony and Augsburger are well established professors at Fuller Seminary. In this book they attempt to answer the question, What should Christian Counseling look like? How will they try to answer this? “We have no intention of doing a survey and, on the basis of the results, describing what Christian counselors do. In an unapologetic manner, we intend to detail the parameters of what we firmly believe should be the foundations and applications of Christian counseling” (viii). Since this is a question that has been on many students minds, I’d like to summarize and comment on their short book of 14 chapters (some 160 pages of text).

I’ll start with their preface…

Some tidbits:
1. These two authors (one clinical psychology and the other pastoral counseling) admit that they never much used the label Christian counseling to describe what they did. “We perceived ourselves as training ‘Christians who counseled,’ more than ‘Christian counselors'” (vii).
2. They are rethinking this position and admitting that “we paid too much homage to current psychological theory instead of boldly proclaiming our explicit reflections on the implications of Christian faith for counseling practice” (vii).
3. They agree that postmodern influences on psychology have opened the door to be more explicitly Christian in one’s counselor identity.
4. Their book is intended to be “prescriptive” and not descriptive.
5. The book will be broken into 3 sections: Foundations (beginning assumptions), Applications (problem areas explored), and Destiny (1 thin chapter on the postmodern world we now live in).

Commentary: I’ll be interested to see what they say about the task of integration. Are they merely critiquing the “timidity” of being explicitly Christian in one’s psychological foundations that has plagued the integration of psychology and theology movement? Or, are they re-thinking that model from top to bottom. I hope the latter. However, I like the fact that they are willing to admit a crucial mistake of trying too hard to fit in with the broader field of psychology and thus neglecting the development of explicitly Christian models human development, growth, pathology, and change. I must admit a bit of suspicion however as I notice that their reference list (the only thing I’ve read beyond the preface) seems thin, dated, and not particularly leaning on biblical scholarship. I suspect they do not even mention the existence of the more biblically oriented christian counseling models that already exist and have existed for some time. But then, they do intend to be prescriptive… 

First chapter reviewed next week.