Intregration (Part 2)

Biblical Counsel for a Change — Steve Gregg

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Intregration (Part 2)

Biblical Counsel for a ChangeSteve Gregg

Steve Gregg explores the potential integration of psychology and Christianity, emphasizing the overlapping aspects of these two realms and the need for a counselor who can address both psychological and theological issues. He raises concerns about the effectiveness and potential harm of psychotherapy, particularly without a biblical foundation. Gregg argues that true transformation comes from Christianity, not pragmatism, and questions the use of psychiatric medications, emphasizing the importance of biblical counsel and discernment in navigating mental health challenges. He concludes by critiquing the competence of some Christian counselors who have adopted psychological concepts without proper biblical grounding.

Transcript

In our last session, I began our discussion of the attempted integration of psychology and Christianity. I said that this was actually syncretism, a mixing of two religious viewpoints. It is not, for example, similar to a Christian making the best use of secular science in some field, for example, engineering or computer science or something like that.

A Christian, of course, can make good use of science and be a Christian, and there be no compromise whatsoever of his Christian integrity in doing so. But psychology, as I've pointed out, is not science. It is theoretical in the extreme.

It is philosophy in nature. And worst of all, it is a religious kind of a philosophy in that it presents a certain . . . it comes from a certain worldview. Each therapist has a worldview and has a system of values, of ultimate reality, an anthropological assessment of what man is, and an ethical system as to what man ought to do and what goals he ought to pursue.

I mean, all of those things are elements that we would normally attribute to a religious system. And if it is not distinctly religious, it at least overlaps sufficiently the categories that religions deal with, that Carl Jung could properly say and correctly say that the therapist is forced into the position of a priest and is made to address issues that properly belong to the realm of theology. And when that is true of a particular discipline, it is not safe to consider it a neutral science which can, without harm, be merged with Christianity and to some good effect.

And so I was talking in our previous class about what I believe the Bible said about keeping the truth the truth, keeping the Scripture pure and not adding to the Word of God. And I was talking especially about those who hold the integrationist position in the Church, people who believe that psychology and Christianity basically have some of the same goals and should be working hand in hand. I told you about the popular writers in the Christian movement right now, Larry Crabb, Gary Collins, others, Dobson and others, very famous people in the Christian community who believe in some measure of integration.

Essentially, the belief in integration is the denial of the adequacy of Scripture. If we believe that the Scripture is somehow enhanced by the inclusion of secular, psychological concepts, we are suggesting that the Scripture does not itself adequately address all things necessary for life and godliness, as of course the Scriptures themselves claim is the case. And so that was the view that I referred to as the inadequacy of Scripture viewpoint.

As we were closing, I simply affirmed that I believe in the adequacy of Scripture. It says in Psalm 119, verse 24, Thy testimonies are my delight, and they are my counselors. And so the Scripture makes it very clear that what God has said is the counselor that we need, gives us all the counsel for the necessary things, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly furnished every good work.

Now in continuing along this line of the integration of psychology and Christianity and my appeal that this not be done, I want to turn now to a consideration of the inadequacy of psychology. Those who wish to integrate psychology with Scripture obviously believe in the inadequacy of Scripture, and they believe in the adequacy of psychology. I believe in the adequacy of Scripture and the inadequacy of psychology.

And I say that not just because I have some kind of an axe to grind against psychologists or psychology itself, it simply is a fact that it is inadequate. It does not do what it promises to do. Christianity does, Jesus does, God has never broken any of his promises that he has made, and therefore we can say that if a person has not obtained through their experiment with Christianity what they hoped to obtain, either they had unrealistic expectations, not based on the Word of God, or else they did not apply the principles of the Word of God sufficiently to realize those expectations that the Bible gives us and holds out to us.

The Bible is true, it is the Word of God, God is true, and every man a liar, as far as Paul's assessment goes. And when we look at psychology, we'll find that psychology is not really able to deliver the goods, and the fact that so many people want to import this ineffective and inadequate system into an already perfect reality which is presented in the Bible, and combine the two as if this will alloy them into a stronger metal. These people simply have a very low view of Scripture and a very unrealistically high view of psychotherapy.

Byram Karasu, the director of the Department of Psychiatry at the Bronx Municipal Hospital Center, he made this comment once in the Dallas Morning News in January 1981 in an article called, May's Bewilders Those Seeking Psychotherapy. And Dr. Karasu said, quote, Underneath the melodrama of who's right or wrong, all therapies have one thing in common, much is promised and little is delivered, as with everything else in life, unquote. So he's rather cynical about life in general, but he says quite honestly, although there may be many, many psychotherapies conflicting in their view of man and of therapy and so forth, even beyond the question of who's right and wrong, one thing is clear that all must agree on, they all have one thing in common, they promise much and deliver very little, says the director of the Department of Psychiatry at the Bronx Municipal Hospital Center.

Stanton Peel is an addiction researcher, and in American Health Journal in the September-October issue 1983, page 42, in an article written called Out of the Habit Trap, Stanton Peel said, quote, Among people in therapy to lose weight, stop smoking, kick a drug or drink addiction, as few as 5% actually make it, unquote. As few as 5% really permanently kick a drug or alcohol habit or lose weight permanently or stop smoking permanently through therapy. Now 5% may be better than nothing, but I remember back in the 70s when David Wilkerson started Teen Challenge, he was getting a success rate of deliverance of drug addicts, hardcore drug addicts, permanent deliverance, as near as anyone could tell, upwards of 90% success rate.

And I heard in those days that even government agencies were going to Teen Challenge to find out what they were doing right, because the government was getting something like 5% success rate. And that is pretty much across the boards in almost any kind of therapy, to change a person's behavior in life permanently, self-destructive behavior that destroys family and finances and health and so forth, people who go to therapy want to get over these things, about 5% do through therapy. That's not an extremely adequate system, because one might argue that 5% or more might get over it without therapy, with or without therapy, such an improvement rate might be expected.

The Christian researchers on this subject, Martin and Dieter Bobgan, whom I've quoted several times in this series, in their book Psychoheresy, pages 46-48, they say this, the Cambridge Somerville Youth Study is well known to researchers, but little known to the public. The study began by selecting 650 underprivileged boys between the ages of 6 and 10, who were high risk with respect to becoming delinquent. Two groups were formed by matching the boys on a number of variables, such as age, IQ, and background.

Then by a flip of a coin, the boys were assigned either to a treatment group or a control group, which received no treatment. Those who were treated received on the average five years of psychotherapy, in addition to academic tutoring, summer camp, and other involvement with organizations such as the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. The boys in the control group were provided no services at all.

Surprise turned to downright embarrassment when both groups were looked at 30 years after all the fuss. In looking at both groups in terms of criminal behavior, mental problems, and alcoholism, the researchers discovered that the ones who had received treatment were doing worse than those who had been left alone. Joan McCord, who conducted the follow-up study, concludes, quote, the objective evidence presents a disturbing picture.

The program seems not only to have failed to prevent its clients from committing crimes, thus correlating studies of other projects, but also to have produced negative side effects, unquote. Now, this has been observed in more than one study. That's a very classic study because it was done over a period of over three years.

And it demonstrates that even if the results were exactly equal, even if the control group was no better off than the experimental group, it would certainly raise questions as to whether therapy had any positive effect at all. Now, who is this? The Brain Mind Bulletin, October 4th, 1982, made this observation, quote, research often fails to demonstrate an unequivocal advantage from psychotherapy. An experiment at the All India Institute of Mental Health in Bangalore found that Western-trained psychiatrists and native healers had a comparable recovery rate.

The most notable difference was that the so-called witch doctors released their patients sooner, unquote. So this is the case. You can put a patient with a problem in with a witch doctor, or you can put him with a modern Western-trained psychiatrist, and chances are about 50-50, I mean, they're about equal.

That he's going to get better or not, the difference is the psychiatrist is going to charge him more and release him later. And the witch doctor charges less and releases his patients earlier. Bernie Zilbergell, in his book, The Shrinking of America, published by Little Browning Company in 1983, said, quote, cures in therapy are not common, and symptoms or presenting complaints rarely disappear, unquote.

So this is kind of a, basically a summary of how the mental health professions are helping. Cures are not common in therapy, and symptoms or presenting complaints rarely disappear. Anthony Storm, in the book, The Art of Psychotherapy, published in 1980, said, there is no convincing evidence that even years of analysis in the most expert hands radically alter a person's fundamental psychopathology.

Now, there's no convincing evidence that even years of analysis in the most competent hands of the best therapists, there's no evidence that this makes any radical difference in a person's psychopathology. Now, there's the problems that he came to get solved. His pathology isn't, you know, he's not improved.

And there's no evidence that this does help. So says Anthony Storm, in the book, The Art of Psychotherapy. Dr. Donald Klein is the professor of psychiatry at New York State Psychiatric Institute.

And he said, as he was giving testimony before the subcommittee on health of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Finance, 95th Congress, 2nd session, 18th of August, 1978, Dr. Donald Klein said, quote, I believe that at present the scientific evidence for psychotherapy efficacy cannot justify public support, unquote. Now by the way, psychotherapy does get a great deal of public support. We mean financial support by taxpayers.

And I doubt if there's a county in the United States that doesn't have a mental health facility supported by taxpayers. And you know, where counseling can be gotten by people who don't have the money to pay for it. And where inmates can be kept in some cases.

Not all of them have, well, I mean, a lot of hospitals have psycho wards and so forth. But there are, of course, state hospitals that are devoted entirely to psychiatric patients, of course. And this is on public money.

And the professor of psychiatry at New York State Psychiatric Institute said, at present the scientific evidence for psychotherapy efficacy cannot justify public support. In other words, there's no evidence that it works. So why spend public money on it? Apparently his testimony was overridden by other considerations.

Two professors, Dr. S.J. Rahman, professor of abnormal psychology and Professor G.T. Wilson, professor of psychology, wrote in a book together, a book that was called The Effects of Psychological Therapy, published 1980 by Pergamon Press, New York. These professors said, quote, it has to be admitted that the scarcity of convincing findings remains a continuing embarrassment. And the profession can regard itself as fortunate that the more strident advocates of accountability have not yet scrutinized the evidence.

If challenged by external critics, which pieces of evidence can we bring forward? The few clear successes to which we can point are outnumbered by the failures. And both are drowned by the unsatisfactory reports and studies from which no safe conclusions can be salvaged, unquote. It doesn't sound like these psychologists, professors, feel that they could marshal much convincing evidence to support the efficacy of what they do or its value at all.

Michael Shepard of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, in a book, I guess it's a book, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, wrote an article called Psychotherapy Outcome Research and Parlov's Pony. And in that article, Michael Shepard wrote, quote, a host of studies have now been conducted which, with all their imperfections, have made it clear that, one, any advantage accruing from psychotherapy is small at best. Two, the difference between the effects of different forms of psychotherapy are negligible.

And three, psychotherapeutic intervention is capable of doing harm, unquote. So as you study all the results of all the research that's been done, these three things can be observed. Good effects of psychotherapy are small at best.

It is possible that they can do harm. And the differences in the results of the various kinds of psychotherapy are negligible, which is interesting since they, you know, 250 different kinds of psychotherapy and the differences in their success rates are negligible. And yet they all have competing therapies and, in many cases, competing views of what's wrong and what needs to be done.

And yet they all get about the same results. None gets any remarkably higher level of success ratings than any other. Michael Scriven was, at one time, a member of the American Psychological Association Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility.

And in the magazine Psychology Today, 1975, he wrote an article, Psychotherapy Can Be Dangerous. And Michael Scriven, at that time, questioned the moral justification, quote, for dispensing psychotherapy given the state of outcome studies which would lead the FDA to ban its sale if it were a drug, unquote. Now this is a member of the American Psychological Association Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility writing in Psychology Today magazine, he says that the FDA would ban psychotherapy if it was a drug based on the results of outcome studies.

Now, it sounds like the same tune again and again and again. These are not coming from fanatical fundamentalist Christian anti-psychology people. These are all from professionals who believe in psychology.

Dr. Dorothy Tenon, in her book Psychotherapy, The Hazardous Cure, 1975, wrote, quote, if the purpose of the research is to prop up a profession sagging under the weight of its own ineffectiveness in a desperate last ditch effort to find a rationale for its survival, we might prefer to put our research dollars elsewhere, unquote. Also, here's a quote from Dr. Lawrence LeChan, who was the president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, the AHP, published in the magazine, the journal Association for Humanistic Psychology, October 1984. He said, quote, psychotherapy may be known in the future as the greatest hoax of the 20th century, unquote.

The president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology says in the future people may look back at psychotherapy as the greatest hoax of this century. Quite a revealing comment. Now, this being the case, psychotherapy being absolutely ineffective, as even its own advocates are forced to admit and research studies have proven, what possible justification can there be for importing its bankrupt views into Christian discipleship and counseling? Even if psychotherapy was as effective as Christianity in transforming lives, it would still not argue for this integration, because we are not pragmatists.

We don't say, well, if it works, let's do it. There are psychic healers in the Philippines who seem to get results through psychic healing, which is occultic and forbidden in Scripture. They seem to get results.

Maybe they might even get more results consistently than Christian faith healers get. I don't know. It may or may not be the case that they do.

But the fact of the matter is, even if they do, this is no argument for Christians to now go and practice occult practices. Pragmatism says, well, if it works, it must be good. Not so.

Many things work that are not good. If my problem is that I'm bankrupt and in serious need of finances, robbing a bank may solve my problem. It works.

But it's not good. There are legitimate and illegitimate ways of getting results to felt needs. And even if psychology were effective at what it promises to do and could fulfill its promises, it would not prove that we should use it in Christianity, since it is a competing religious worldview and competing system of change.

But the fact of the matter is that psychology is not even effective, not even close to being as effective as Christianity through the ages has proven to be in transforming character and what they call psychopathologies. But it just seems like the Christian movement is so blinded. If they have turned from the Scripture, how could they be anything other than blinded? I might at this point take a little digression to talk about Christianity and psychiatry.

We've been talking about the use of psychotherapy and psychology mixed with Christian counseling. Of course, there's a whole different ball of wax when you talk about Christians' use of psychiatry, because as I've made clear in the past, psychology, psychotherapy is talk, somebody telling you what's wrong with you and what you should do about it and how you should think about it. That's all talk.

It's all mental. But psychiatry more and more resorts almost exclusively to the administration of psychotic medications or anti-psychotic medications. Some of them make you psychotic.

Some of them are supposed to make you non-psychotic. But they do have paradoxical effects in many cases and actually cause the problems that they're supposed to be curing. What's amazing to me is how many Christians just buy into this.

On my radio program years ago, actually it wasn't my radio program, I was sitting in for another man on his radio program, I raised the issue of psychiatric drugs and their use among Christians two days in a row, four hours altogether because it was a two-hour radio broadcast. And the first day, when I questioned the legitimacy of the use of psychoactive drugs for Christians, I got so much hate calls from Christians. Almost all of them were the parents of children that were on psychiatric medications, which had been of course put on those medications by the parents on approval.

Whether it was children with ADD and given Ritalin, or whether it was parents of teenagers who seemed to be psychotic or schizophrenic or whatever, and they put them on neuroleptic medications, or whether it was parents of children who were manic-depressive and they were put on lithium. These people were all calling up angry at me for even suggesting that Christians have an alternative solution to these life problems than that which is offered psychiatry. And I was pointing out the side effects that are known to accompany the use of these medications, but are very seldom told.

And those side effects can be scary. It can in many cases certainly be a cure that is worse than the disease. And some of them are physical, debilitating, permanent nerve damage and brain damage and so forth that's caused by some of these drugs at times.

And so-called psychiatric patients are typically to a very large extent guinea pigs for a psychiatric profession that is wondering what this drug will do over a period of ten years of use. And they find out at the expense of their guinea pigs that they tried it on. Not always, it's not always quite so crass as that, but it has been known to be.

And there are some very devastating side effects of some of these drugs, which many Christians who put their children on them or take them themselves have never been surprised of and they don't want to hear it. You know why they don't want to hear it? Because these drugs make life easier. If you've got a misbehaving child and you give them a drug and it sedates him, parents like that.

You know, it works. My child suddenly became sanctified. And some of the parents take them themselves.

And this I consider to be fairly wrong-headed. Now I have never told anyone to go off of their psychiatric medications. I'll tell you why.

Because A, it can be dangerous to go off them. Many psychiatric medications are physically addictive. And the withdrawal from psychiatric medications can be every bit as bad as withdrawing from a severe case of heroin or cocaine addiction.

And if a person is to come off those drugs, generally speaking, if they ask my opinion, I would recommend that they do so under their doctor's supervision. Actually, have their doctor wean them of those drugs. But I don't recommend cold turkey abandonment of those drugs, although I've known many people who have gone off them cold turkey and have done just fine.

I know some people who just decided it wasn't God's will for them to take those drugs, so they just stopped and everything went fine. But things can go wrong. And I would not wish to be responsible for bringing such things on a person.

Of course, I'm not responsible for them beginning to take drugs in the first place. But if I tell them to go off, I would want them to go off under the same medical supervision under which they went on the drugs. But another reason I don't tell them that they should all go off is because some people go on those drugs because they will not change in the biblical manner.

To say that there is a biblical and Christian solution to behavior problems does not mean that everybody will avail themselves of that solution. And those who will not often need to be brought under the control of law or of some other force that will make them behave. And I'm not suggesting that everyone in mental hospitals should just suddenly be taken off their drugs.

In many cases, they are on drugs because their behavior was already bad, and they already were showing that they were not going to behave, they were not going to live like Christians, and therefore they were given drugs as a management tool. It's as if a man went around raping women all the time, and he just wouldn't stop. Now, should that person be put in jail? Well, yes, he should.

Although I'd have to say the ideal Christian solution is for that man to repent and stop. Of course, he should go to jail anyway, even if he repents. A man who does criminal activity should have to pay for his crimes.

Even if he's right with God, he still has a debt to society. But I would say this, if we put him in jail or in a mental institution in order to control his aggressive behavior that leads him to rape, that is not really how God wants him to stop doing it. God would rather have him repent of his sins, be transformed by the renewal of his mind, and change his behavior in a distinctly Christian way.

But what if he will not? Well, then there's prison cells and padded cells and straitjackets and drugs to keep those people under control. So, in saying that I am opposed in principle to the use of psychiatric drugs, I need to clarify. I am opposed to Christians resorting to the use of these drugs when, in fact, they have generally speaking not exhausted all of the options that Christ has given for the overcoming of certain problems.

But that is obviously, I seem to be in the minority among Christians because most people just assume that these drugs are just like medication. In fact, they call them meds, they call them medications. They're not medications.

They're not medicine. Medicine is something that cures a disease, or at least it affects a disease in some positive way. These medications do not in any way affect a diseased body or a diseased brain.

There is no disease here. They are not symptom-specific medical treatments. They are in many cases hardly distinguishable from certain street drugs, which is why there's a tremendous black market for prescription drugs out on the street because people who can't get their cocaine can get the same high of taquenrytalin or some other antidepressants or something.

And these drugs are mood alterers, but they are not cures for some sickness. Alcohol is a mood altering drug. It is not a cure for any sickness.

A person who is feeling down in the dumps may feel a lot better if he goes out and drinks enough alcohol, but that doesn't mean that he had a disease and the alcohol cured it. It doesn't mean that he had an alcohol deficiency in his blood level and that proves that that was his problem because now that he's raised the alcohol level, he feels much better. This is not medication.

This is something that alters the brain's behavior, but is not addressing a sickness. This is evident from the fact that you can take the same medication and give it to someone who doesn't have any mental diagnosis and in many cases get exactly the same results. In fact, you can take... Many of the drugs the gifts are simply known to block a certain type of neurotransmission in the brain and deaden a portion of the brain that otherwise is active in ways that are undesirable.

And all they have to do is just cut off the activity of that portion of the brain and the undesirable activity to a certain degree can be controlled. But you know if you give the same drug to a dog that has never been diagnosed as mentally ill, it cuts off that brain activity for that dog too. This is not a sickness specific medication.

These don't cure anything. They don't even claim to cure anything. They don't claim that.

They are only a management tool, just like a straitjacket is a management tool, or a padded cell or a prison cell is a management tool. These are not the ways that God desires for Christians to manage their lives. People, when they hear that I object to giving patients lithium and so forth and ADD patients Ritalin and other kinds of things, the neuroleptic drugs to diagnose schizophrenics and so forth, they say, well, do you think a diabetic shouldn't take his drug as it were? Are you opposed to the taking of drugs of sick people? Well, there's a difference there.

The insulin that a diabetic takes is something his body is known to need, which is naturally produced in the body when everything is functioning properly. And when the pancreas is not working properly, it doesn't produce insulin, then a person will die. He needs insulin.

It is a life-supporting chemical that is natural to the body but is not found in certain bodies that have a certain disorder and needs to be taken artificially. That is a far cry, ethically or in principle in any way, from giving lithium to a person who is diagnosed as bipolar affected, which is manic depressive. You see, lithium is not known to have any use in the human body.

It is a slightly toxic metallic salt that is found in our bodies for the same reason lead is found in our bodies. Both of them are toxic, both of them are bad for you, but they're both found in nature. They're in the air, they're in the water, they're in the food we eat, and therefore they get into our body and they're in our bloodstream.

It is known that just as lead does certain harmful things to the body, so lithium does certain things that are harmful to the body, but the damage is the cure. You see, lithium taken in sufficient dosages will deaden certain brain activity. This is not curing a disease, this is just a deadening of certain activities of the brain.

Alcohol will do that too if you drink enough. Different effect, but doesn't deaden the same activities of the brain, but you can do that with lots of different drugs, psychoactive and mood-altering drugs. They deaden some activity of the brain and you call that a cure.

But the brain was never sick. It was the behavior that was wrong. And so, to put lithium in your body may in fact get desired results, we'll call it a cure because the person's behaving the way he wants to behave.

His moods are more the way he wants them to be. He's managing his moods better. He's managing his mind better.

We say there's a cure there. Well, that's pragmatism talking because if it gets a result that the person considers desirable, we just call that good no matter what the moral or spiritual ramifications may be. You know, the Bible talks about something called pharmakia.

It is referred to in Galatians chapter 5 among the works of the flesh. It is also mentioned in the book of Revelation as one of the sins that the people do not repent of after God twists their arms terribly tight by beating them up real bad with plagues. They still don't repent of their murders and their thefts and their pharmakia.

Well, pharmakia in the traditional translation of the Bible is translated as sorcery, but actually you can tell by the sound of it, it is the root word for our word in English, pharmacy or pharmaceuticals. And pharmakia is known to have been related to the use of substances, chemical substances of a mind-altering sort. Usually it was done in connection with occult practices and that's why it came to be called sorcery.

But it is simply the use of drugs that alter the mind. Now, there are drugs that do not alter the mind, that treat sicknesses and so forth, but drugs that simply alter the mind, we certainly have reason to question whether those are things Christians should be taking. Now, some might say, well, what about drinking coffee? Doesn't caffeine alter the mind? Well, in some measure it does for some people.

Some people are stimulated by caffeine, others are hardly stimulated by it. But the question is whether that kind of stimulation really interferes with brain activity. For some people it probably does.

And if it does, they probably shouldn't drink it. I think food itself alters moods. I mean, you can't avoid putting things into your mouth and your stomach that in some sense have an effect on your mood.

But when you put something in there that deliberately deadens the activity of your brain and prevents you from functioning at full capacity that God made you to function at, and this unnecessarily, because you were not sick and you didn't need that medication. This I consider to be bad practice. Shall I call it sin? I don't want to be condemning of it.

Many people just don't know how to get a hold of God's resources for some reason. Many professing Christians struggle and struggle. They pray, they go for deliverance, they go to Christian counselors, they read the Bible, and they don't seem to get any help.

So they go to the psychiatrist last of all. Other people just go straight to the psychiatrist and just pass up all that preliminary failure. But the fact is, I don't believe that those who have failed to cope with their mental and mood and behavior problems, I don't think they have availed themselves.

And I don't mean to sound hard. I don't mean to sound uncompassionate. But I dare say that all of us probably have lived long enough to know that some people jump through the hoops and go through the motions of Christianity, of prayer, of Bible reading and so forth, and never really connect with God and never really tap His resources, never even get saved.

Everyone here knows you can pray, in other words, you can say prayers and not be praying. And I don't mean to put down people who would say they've tried all that spiritual stuff, all that Jesus stuff, but now it just didn't work, I need to go to the doctor for this. I'm not trying to condemn them or put them down.

I'm just trying to say I suspect they gave up too soon on God as their healer. Is there no Bauman Gilead? Is there no healer there? Gary Collins, I mentioned earlier, wrote the book Can You Trust Psychology? And for some reason he goes off on an advocacy of psychiatric medications, although he's a professor of psychology, not psychiatry. In his book Can You Trust Psychology, let me just exert a few paragraphs here so you can see how some Christians would like to integrate psychiatry with Christianity.

Quote, as researchers accumulate more data about mental illness, it is becoming clearer that many forms of psychopathology have a biological basis. Present research suggests that the best treatment may be a combination of drugs and behavior therapy. This is a Christian writing here.

He's a professor at a Christian seminary. Surely there are few people who would deny that medication is a great benefit in such cases. Medication can also be beneficial when problems are less severe.

Certainly we all agree that there are some extreme cases where medication...anyone here want to say we should never use medication for any case at all? Okay, everyone agrees. Sometimes medication is good. Let's move a little further.

Medication can also be beneficial when problems are not really so severe. Let's make this more mainstream here. And the cause is less clearly biological.

Isn't that something? Now you start talking about, we know there's biological causes to some of this stuff. So obviously when there's biological causes, we need medication. Everyone agree? Agreed.

Okay, got full agreement here. Okay, next. What if the cause isn't so clearly biological? Still, the same drugs can be useful.

Even when they're not addressing a biological issue. Well, they always address a biological issue. Unfortunately, sometimes they address a healthy biological patient and make him less healthy biologically because of their introduction to his system.

Okay, medication can also be beneficial when problems are less severe and the cause is less clearly biological. Often a mild tranquilizer or antidepressant will calm a troubled mind. I thought God was capable of doing that.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't have inserted my comments. Continuing the quote, and free the individual to work at facing and solving problems. On occasion, taking an anti-anxiety drug will help people feel more relaxed so they can do things like public speaking that would be difficult or impossible otherwise.

When taken under the direction of a physician who is careful and knowledgeable, such medication can be helpful. Sometimes we forget that many apparent emotional problems really result from physical disorders. Attention deficit disorder, also known as ADD, for example, is relatively common, especially among children.

The symptoms are largely psychological. Hyperactivity, inability to concentrate, distractibility, nervous mannerisms, impulsiveness, and mood swings. But the cause appears to be physical.

It results, most often, from a genetically acquired malfunctioning of the central nervous system. And it is best treated with drugs. What at first seems to be an emotional, spiritual, or discipline problem really is a physical problem.

Psychiatric textbooks include numerous other examples. Chemical, neurological, and medical conditions often create physically based emotional problems that are best treated by medication. This is a Christian trying to help Christians know how to solve their problems.

First of all, he's wrong. He's misinformed. I don't think he's lying.

I think he's just misinformed. He says it is clear that there is a biological basis now for ADD. He admits that all the symptoms are behavioral.

There are no physical symptoms. Isn't that interesting? A disease that has no physical symptoms, only behavior, tells the therapist that this disease is present. And he says it's best treated with drugs.

Yeah, I have a Christian friend in town here. He made the mistake of putting his kids in public school for the first few years of their schooling. Now they're in homeschooling.

The reason they're homeschooling now, the thing that got him to make that decision was that his kids were poorly behaved in school. And so the counselors took them aside and took the parents aside and said, we think your children have attention deficit disorder and you need to start putting them on medications. And this man said, no, I don't think they have any such need for medication.

And the school simply didn't agree and told them they either had to do it or take them out of school. Which was probably the best thing that ever happened to them because it gave them a reason to take them out of school. They should have taken them out earlier.

But drugs are great management tools for people who simply don't fit the mold of the perfectly standardized socialist cog child, you know, who fits like a cog in a gear on a machine. People, according to scripture, are individuals. Not all of their behavior has to conform with the behavior of all other people.

Of course, if you're going to put 30 of them in a classroom for six hours a day, you've got to manage them. And if they're poorly disciplined or they're overly energetic, you give them a psychiatric label and put them on a drug. Makes life a lot easier for the teacher.

Terrible for the child. Many times becomes addicted for life to Ritalin, which is chemically hardly distinguishable from cocaine. And many will admit that this is sometimes a lifetime addiction for these kids.

But certainly made the life of the parent and the teacher easier. Now, this man is just regurgitating what he's been told by people who obviously are advocates of psychiatry. I don't know why he would advocate psychiatry.

He's a professor of psychology, but he apparently has been taken in. It's sad that he thinks that people should even take antidepressants when they're feeling a little low and anti-anxiety drugs for things when they're not even mentally unhealthy. Well, you know, I'm a little nervous about speaking in front of a group.

So maybe I should take this anti-anxiety drug. This downer. And this will make it... What's he saying here? Oh, my.

He says that on occasion, taking an anti-anxiety drug will help people feel more relaxed so they can do things like public speaking that would be difficult or impossible otherwise. Let me suggest to you this. If a person would find it difficult or impossible to speak in the public without a drug, maybe God doesn't want them to speak in public.

Nothing is impossible if God wants you to do it. Now, if it's simply difficult and God does want you to speak, there are better ways for Christians to overcome difficulties than just popping a pill. Apparently not in the mind of this man.

Now, in contrast to him, I have several pages of quotes from actual psychiatrists and experts who are not Christian who say just the opposite about the efficacy of these drugs and the need for them. It's the irony again. You know, the Christian advocating the pagan cure and the pagan saying it doesn't work.

It's an amazing thing. Christians always seem to be following the wrong gurus. Let me read you several excerpts.

These are interesting. It's lengthy, but I think they're worth reading. They come from several books.

This one comes from Peter Schrag in his book, The Mind of Manipulators. None of these authors I'm reading are Christian here. They're simply experts on the issue of psychiatric drugs.

Peter Schrag in The Mind of Manipulators wrote, quote, tension, anxiety, sorrow, guilt, and other mental discomforts all dissolve in sufficient quantities of alcohol, opiates, tranquilizers like Valium, Librium, Quaaludes, Thorazine, Stelazine, Melaril, Prolixen, etc. Of course, we could also add now Prozac to that. This is an older book.

Marijuana and hashish also helped reduce anxiety and dim unpleasant feelings. Small wonder, then, that man has self-medicated himself from time immemorial with alcohol and the resins of the hemp and the poppy plants to dissolve his civilized anxieties, to block his frontal lobes, to turn down the clamor of his limbic system, to return briefly to a pre-human state of nature or innocence. Small wonder that physicians have sought synthetic drugs to free consciousness from the tortures of conscience.

Isn't that an interesting observation from a non-Christian? That people have throughout history found drugs and substances to calm down their native impulses and anxieties and things like that, and to return to a pre-human or a sub-human state. And that physicians have sought synthetic drugs to free the consciousness from the tortures of the conscience. That is a fascinating observation, I think.

The same author, Peter Schrogin, The Mind Manipulators, wrote, and I quote him here, The tranquilizers were the first fruits of a veritable chemical cornucopia of mind-altering drugs developed in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Pharmaceutical companies soon produced drugs for every mood. Pills to make you happy, pills to make you quiet, pills to make you hallucinate, pills to make you vegetate.

Another quote from the same book, quote, The difficulty with the theory, as most of the controlled studies indicate, is that psychotherapy alone, or psychotherapy in combination with the drugs, is no more effective than drugs alone. And that there are no cures, aside from spontaneous remission, quote unquote, for most of the vaguely defined ailments classified as mental disorder or mental illness. Therapy, as measured by effect, thus almost always means maintenance, and maintenance almost always means drugs.

No one is certain how most psychotropic drugs work, why they work, when they work, and even how the major classes of drugs differ from one another, nor is there any chance of agreement until the conditions which those drugs are supposed to mitigate are more precisely defined. There is, after all, no reliable way to judge the effects of antipsychotic phenothiazines, thorazine, stelazine, melaril, on schizophrenia if the schizophrenia is really depression, nor is there a way to measure the value of antidepressants on a situational depression produced by a depressing experience. Most members of the psychopharmacology establishment insist that many drugs are highly specific, and the minor tranquilizers are ineffective in reducing hallucinations or other distortions of thought associated with schizophrenia, and that conversely, antipsychotics have little impact on anxiety, a dubious belief that seems to derive from the traditional conception, as one writer put it, of drug specificity exemplified by Paul Ehrlich's notion of the magic bullet, wherein a given chemical agent is believed to seek out a specific target in the organism.

Many radical psychiatrists, on the other hand, contend that the phenothiazines are like all other tranquilizers, only more powerful and dangerous, that they simply suppress certain physical energizing systems in the body, that none of them has any specific effect on physiological functions, and that the apparent impact of antipsychotics on delusions or hallucinations is simply a consequence of suppression of the brain. In this view, the specific effect is a myth created by the doctors. Downers are downers." I'm going to skip over some of Schrag's other quotes here, but here's one from Dr. Lee Coleman in his book, The Reign of Error.

He's a practicing psychiatrist. I mentioned he's been called into hundreds of court cases where the defendant was pleading insanity, and he's always called in to prove that there is no way that insanity can be an excuse for criminal behavior. And in his book, The Reign of Error, psychiatry law, and I forget the subtitle, it has something to do with law and psychiatry.

In his book, he says this, "...some patients seem to benefit from them and take them willingly because they feel the calming effect is worth a degree of diminished alertness. But it makes a difference whether a patient takes medication because he or she finds it helpful, or because the patient believes the doctor has discovered a brain abnormality that can be treated with drugs. Millions of patients are now told by their doctors to stay on psychoactive medications for years and even for a lifetime." Continuing with Lee Coleman, he says, "...while great numbers of mental patients are forced to stay on drugs, many others do so because they have been told the drugs are necessary for their body chemistry.

Many people taking lithium, for example, have told me that this substance is a normal part of the body and that they are manic-depressive because they have a lithium deficiency. Their doctor, they said, has discovered the deficiency through a blood test and had prescribed a lifetime of lithium to correct this abnormality. Lithium does not occur naturally in the body, so no person has ever suffered a lithium deficiency.

Authorities advocate that patients be educated in the concept that lithium is a perpetual preventative, much like insulin. These authorities also call lithium a simple, naturally occurring substance. It therefore comes as no surprise that many patients consider lithium to be like a new vitamin.

Unfortunately, they are wrong. Lithium is a very toxic substance whose side effects include permanent kidney and thyroid damage, as well as other potential complications." That's from Dr. Lee Coleman. Dr. Peter Breggin, in his book, Toxic Psychiatry, wrote, quote, The relaxation, the easing of strain, of maladjustments, of excessive self-consciousness, of excessive inhibitions, indeed the euphoria, may sometimes be beneficial.

All of the commonly used minor tranquilizers, with the possible exception of Boost Bar, are central nervous system depressants, very similar to alcohol and barbiturates in their clinical effects. Along with alcohol and barbiturates, they are classified as sedative hypnotics, meaning that they produce relaxation, or sedation, at lower doses, and sleep, or hypnosis, and eventually coma at higher ones. The basic clinical effect on the mind cannot be distinguished from alcohol or barbiturates, unquote.

Dr. Peter Breggin. I have another quote here. I'm coming to the end of these quotes here, but these final quotes come from Dr. Lee Coleman again.

Quote, Drugs certainly influence the brain, and may therefore influence behavior. But this proves nothing about the nature of mental disorders. Even leading advocates of psychiatry's drug revolution sometimes admit that mental disorders have not been shown to result from faulty brain chemistry.

Solomon Snyder, for example, concludes in his book, Madness in the Brain, with a frank admission. After reviewing the drugs used both experimentally and for the treatment of schizophrenia, he comments, No specific biochemical abnormality has ever been demonstrated in the body fluid or brains of schizophrenics. But at whatever level the problems are approached, reliance on medications hardly seems the answer.

Yet today, psychiatrists all too often put their primary emphasis on arriving at the right combination of mind-altering drugs. This is nothing new for psychiatry. Over and over, psychiatry has developed new ways to alter the bodies of mental patients, and therefore change behavior and feelings, claiming that these alterations prove that a medical disease was being treated.

Some patients seem to benefit from them, and take them willingly because they feel calming effect is worth a degree of diminished alertness. I read that part earlier. Final quote from Lee Coleman says, I see no grand conspiracies or villains among psychiatrists.

We are all heirs to a tradition that hems us in. We all have relied on psychiatry for so many decades that we feel naked without its protective garb. And when I suggest that we strip this garb away, I do not mean to imply that society's problems will disappear.

The problems we now expect psychiatrists to solve will remain serious and complex. But only when we stop relying on psychiatry to solve problems it cannot solve will we be free to turn our attention to alternative and ultimately more effective approaches. Sorry for all those lengthy quotes, but I think that we hear so much the opposite.

We need to realize that there are experts out there writing whole book-length treatments. Toxic Psychiatry by Peter Bragan is an immense volume. And he's also written more recently about Prozac, which is apparently the most popular drug today.

There's a famous book that came out advocating Prozac, which was called Listening to Prozac. Peter Bragan wrote a response called Talking Back to Prozac. And he's sort of an outlaw in the psychiatric community, although he's a leading psychiatrist.

He's been in practice for over 30 years, I believe, back east and authored many books. So what we find is that neither psychotherapy, that is talk therapy, nor psychiatry, the use of drugs, really is an effective cure for behavior. And yet Christians seem to be running and fawning over it as if this was what Christianity has always lacked.

But one has got to ask whether Christianity has ever lacked anything before there was psychology, before Freud, before the psychoactive drugs were around. How did Christians handle problems then? How were they expected to? Now someone's going to say, well, Christians had the same problems everyone else did. They were village idiots and madmen, and they were locked up or excluded from society or put to death or something else.

Now I will not deny that probably that was the way that some communities handled things before they had psychiatry and psychology. But according to Paul, and I believe the record of Christian history would show that there are always many cases of this, people with very serious misbehaviors, self-destructive and otherwise, were redeemed from those behaviors, from that bondage to sin, through the power of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit alone. And I have never found anyone yet who could prove that the proper application of biblical truth and submission to God has not been all that is necessary for people who have behavior and mood problems to become people who can cope better with life and be productive and useful.

I want to just use the remaining time we have in this session to talk about a Christian philosophy of counseling. One of the handouts I gave you earlier mentioned that counseling is not a concept found in the Bible, not what we mean by counseling today. Counsel, of course, is a biblical word, but counsel just means advice or admonishment.

But today counseling is more often a term used for therapy, psychotherapy in particular. And there are more and more Christians who believe that people need counseling. And I'm not sure that this is true.

If marriages are in trouble, they run off to a marriage counselor or a family counselor. Now, let me say this. I know some marriage and family counselors who are godly and who believe everything I've said in these lectures so far.

They absolutely abhor psychology. They distrust psychiatry. They believe in the adequacy of Scripture.

There are Christian counselors like that, and they do counseling. And I do not wish to criticize them. Though one of them in particular, probably the main one I know who does this for a living, is moving as quickly as he can out of that into pastoral work because he's now pastoring in a church, too.

And I think he's finding more and more conflicts in his convictions about some of these things and the work he does. It's not so much that I don't believe that Christians should ever go to another Christian and get some counseling or counsel. I'm not saying that should never be done.

The problem is that people who have counseling professions, have to also counsel non-Christians. Now, that's not a problem if you're in private practice. The man I'm talking about who's moving into pastoral ministry is in private practice.

And of course, if a non-Christian comes into his office for counseling, he can preach the gospel to them and give them biblical answers. However, I know another man, a professional psychological counselor in this town, who works for the county. And he works as a counselor to people.

And of course, most of his so-called patients are non-Christians. Nor is he allowed even to mention Christianity or Jesus as the solution for some of his problems. What a horrible straitjacket that would be to be in as a Christian, knowing that this person's life is a total wreck because they're neglecting God.

They're rebelling against God. They're neglecting every principle God's laid out for human conduct. The cure would certainly come through submitting to Jesus Christ and the power of his spirit for transformation in their lives.

And yet, they're not allowed to say so. All they're talking about is some psycho babble mumbo jumbo, which they probably know in their heart of hearts isn't really going to help at all. But they take a paycheck for this.

This to me would seem very, very difficult for my conscience to do. I couldn't make a living doing such a thing. I mean, if I were, as I said, in private practice and offered myself as a counselor, and non-Christians came, because I'm in private practice, I can say whatever I want, then I would evangelize them all as best I could.

But to be in a position to have to give counsel to help people change their lives and overcome their problems, but not be free to evangelize them, which is really what their need is, and to disciple them, it would be horrible. By the way, the guy who I know who is in that position, he's got serious mood problems himself. And maybe it's because of this conflict in his life as a Christian, knowing certain truths, but in his profession, having to counsel people who desperately need to know those truths, but he's not allowed to tell them.

Scary. Well, should a Christian see a counselor? Well, of course. If by counselor we're not necessarily talking about someone who's a trained psychotherapist, your parents, if they are godly, can be the very best counselors you'll ever have.

Or older Christians in the church, a pastor or elder, a godly Christian friend, any of those people can function as a counselor if by counseling we mean they call your attention back to the truth of what God says, that they can discern from a biblical point of view what's going wrong in your life, what you're doing wrong and what it is that needs to be changed so that you can be doing right again. Any Christian who's biblically informed can provide that kind of counsel, and there's no reason why you should not go to such a counselor for that. When I say the Bible is enough, I don't mean to say that we don't need the body of Christ to help remind us of what the Bible says at times when we're forgetful of that, or call to mind or focus us on a biblical truth that we're neglecting at a given moment.

I do believe that a person who's saturated with the Bible and obedient to God will very seldom maybe need as much counseling from other Christians. But I do think that most Christians, they don't have total recall of everything that's in the Bible, and even things they know or have known sometimes are not in the forefront of their minds, and they forget them, and I think a Christian who can counsel from Scripture can provide a very valid service to Christians in that sense. But let us consider the other corollary to this question.

Should a Christian ever see a non-Christian counselor? By the way, we could expand this question to include, should a Christian see a Christian counselor who has learned everything he knows from non-Christian counselors? Because that is the case. When you go to a Christian psychologist, he did not learn his psychology from Christians. Well, he might have, because he might have gotten his degree at a Christian university where the professor was a Christian, but that Christian university professor didn't get it from Christians.

If you go back far enough, it didn't come from Christian minds. It is simply that Christians have dutifully passed along pagan ideas generation by generation until the Christian psychologists say, well, the man who taught me this was a godly Christian man. He loved the Word of God.

How could it not be Christian? Well, a lot of pastors are godly men of God who teach false doctrine accidentally, inadvertently. And I'm not trying to call into question the motivations of Christian psychologists. I'm simply saying it's an observable, demonstrable fact that when they are teaching psychology, they are not teaching things that originated from within the Christian community.

And they certainly didn't originate in the Bible. They came from pagans, in many cases pagans who had an agenda to deliberately contradict and refute and overthrow Christianity. Therefore, I would say in answering the question, should a Christian see a non-Christian counselor? The answer would be identical if we would say, should a Christian see a Christian counselor whose training was in non-Christian psychology, which is the only kind of psychology there is.

My answer, of course, is no. Gary Collins, on the other hand, who wrote Can You Trust Psychology and who is professor of psychology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, he writes in his book Can You Trust Psychology, quote, we may agree that whenever possible, it is preferable for Christians to seek help from competent Christian counselors. But what do we do when it is not possible to get help from a believer because no Christian counselors are available? Where does one go for help when local Christian counselors are known to be incompetent? Do we tell a concerned mother to send her suicidal teenage son to an untrained and inexperienced counselor who is a Christian, but who may have no understanding of adolescent suicide, the nature of habitual drug use, or the nature of the use of drugs? Do we tell a concerned mother to send her suicidal teenage son to an untrained and inexperienced counselor who is a Christian, but who may have no understanding of adolescent suicide, the nature of habitual drug use, or the physiological aspects of drug addiction? Frequently, it simply is not possible to find a competent Christian counselor.

At such times, we must settle on the most acceptable alternative available. And of course, what he means by that is go to a non-Christian counselor. A non-Christian psychotherapist, a non-Christian teenager.

It is possible that none of the Christians anywhere around would be as competent to counsel the situation as a non-Christian psychologist. Psychotherapist, that's what he's saying. A non-Christian psychotherapist would be better equipped to deal with suicidal tendencies and drug addiction than a Christian who is not competent.

Not competent in what sense? Not trained, in other words, in psychotherapy. Well, I would say that people who are trained in psychotherapy have not demonstrated that they have any advantage over untrained people in knowing how to solve people's problems. That's been documented earlier in this discussion from quotes from people who know.

But the worst of it is, is that the psychotherapist who is not a Christian is going to give non-Christian counsel. The Bible specifically says, blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly. And it's impossible for any counselor to give values-free counsel, because counsel can never be values-free.

Whenever counsel is given, there is a presupposition of what is desirable, what is good, what is it we really want to accomplish here, what is the goal? Or else you wouldn't seek counseling. And the second thing is, you know, what is the best way to obtain that goal? Well, certainly Christians and non-Christians cannot possibly have the same opinion of what the highest goal is. To the Christian, the highest goal is to bring glory to God.

That's not even on the list of a non-Christian's goals. In what sense could an ungodly person give counsel that is appropriate for Christians? A suicidal teenager has to be confronted with his sin, with his rebellion, with his self-centeredness. You don't need a special three-unit course on adolescent suicide.

I've talked to many suicidal people. In fact, I've had people say they've read one of my tracts and they were suicidal and they gave up their plans of suicide. They got saved.

Suicide is a sin. It's not an illness. And to say that an ungodly psychotherapist would be better equipped to deal with a sin problem in a teenager from a Christian home than his own Christian parents who know God and who know the Bible and know what sin is, even though they're not trained psychotherapists, this is blasphemy as far as I'm concerned.

It is just outright heresy. I can't think of any tamer words to use for it. Psalm 11 says, Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2.14, But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him. Neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. If a person's got a suicide problem or any other kind of behavior, a problem of a moral nature, and anything that's self-destructive or destructive to others is moral in nature, then they have a sin problem.

It's a spiritual problem. And the natural man does not understand. He cannot understand the things, but they're spiritually discerned.

They're foolishness to the natural man. And whatever else may be said about a trained non-Christian counselor, he is a natural man. He does not know what makes the spiritual man.

And yet he is trying to give spiritual advice and to change and improve people's spiritual conditions. When in fact the things of the Spirit of God are foolishness to him, what possible benefit could be gained from him? Isaiah 8.20 says, To the law and to the testimony. That means go to the scriptures.

If they speak not according to this word, it is better to speak according to the word of God. And if they speak not according to this word, it is better to speak according to the word of God. If they speak not according to this word, it is because there's no light in them.

Non-Christian psychotherapists certainly do not govern their minds by what the scriptures say. Therefore, there is no light in them. In Jeremiah 8.9, Jeremiah chapter 8, verse 9, Jeremiah says, The wise men are ashamed.

They are dismayed and taken. Lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord. What wisdom is in them? Rhetorical question.

The answer, of course, is none. In Colossians 2.8, Paul said, Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. Beware lest anyone spoil you through philosophy and beliefs that come from traditions of men and from the rudiments of the world.

They do not come from Christ. Beware. Christians are not beingware.

They are not paying close attention to whose philosophy is governing their behavior. In many cases, they go directly to the world for answers. We have been taught that this is a problem for professionals.

Jeremiah 23 has one of my favorite scriptures in it. Jeremiah 23, verses 28-30 says, God says, He that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat, saith the Lord? Is not my word like as a fire, saith the Lord, and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, who steal my words, everyone from his neighbor.

Now, he is talking about false prophets here and real prophets. He says, let the true prophet lay out his word and let the false prophet lay out his word. Let's just compare them.

Can't you tell the difference between wheat and chaff at first glance? Is not my word superior, obviously? What is the chaff to the wheat, saith the Lord? Is not my word like a fire, saith the Lord? And like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? It is. You know, when you read scripture and God's assessment of man's problem and God's commands, and then you compare that with the drivel that's in the Christian psychology books, which is only bad because it's the same drivel that's on the secular psychology books, dressed up with Christian terminology, same wrong concepts, just baptized with Christian words. Sometimes, sometimes they don't even baptize with Christian words, they use the same old secular words for it.

It's so obvious to see which is wheat and which is chaff. It's obvious to see which is doomed to destruction, which has no permanence, and which is the pure word of God. Well, that is my answer to the question, should a Christian see a non-Christian counselor, or a Christian counselor who gets their counsel from non-Christians? No.

Otherwise, you are walking in the counsel of the ungodly. What about this? Is a Christian capable of counseling a fellow believer without using psychological insights? Or, you know, insights from professional psychology without any training? Larry Crabb doesn't think so. Larry Crabb, in his book, Understanding People, which I think would better be called Misunderstanding People, said this, quote, unless we understand sin as rooted in unconscious beliefs, there's the Freudian unconscious throughout his writings, unless we understand sin as rooted in unconscious beliefs and motives, and figure out how to expose and deal with these deep forces within the personality, the church will continue to promote superficial adjustment, while psychotherapists with or without biblical foundations will do a better job than the church of restoring troubled people to more effective functioning.

And that is a pitiful tragedy. There is something about that statement that is a pitiful tragedy, but it's not that the church is ignoring the unconscious roots in unconscious beliefs and motives in sin. There is no suggestion in scripture that sin arises out of unconscious beliefs and unconscious motives.

Again, remember what we mean by unconscious. We're not talking about, you just weren't thinking about it at the moment. I mean, certainly it is often the case that we do wrong things at moments where we're not very much aware of why we're doing them.

We're not thinking too deeply about our reasoning, and our motivations may not be presenting themselves plainly to us at the moment. But that's not what is meant by the Freudian unconscious. The unconscious is that reservoir of unremembered memories that are always there and always dictating behavior, including, according to Larry Krebs, sinful behavior, but which you will never remember.

It's not just that they've slipped your mind now. They're in a realm that you can never remember. They're unconscious, the unconscious realm.

You can't be conscious of them. There's no way of discerning that they're there, except through psychoanalysis or some other gobbledygook. Now, this is Larry Krebs' view.

So his opinion is that, of course, without psychological training, the church could never give adequate counseling to people for their sin. He actually uses sin as a word. He doesn't use the word mental illness here.

He says sin, until we understand that sin is rooted in unconscious beliefs and motives. We will not be able to give anything more than superficial help. Isn't that interesting? That before Freud, there was not one Christian who ever lived on the planet who had ever heard of Freud's idea of sin.

It was a very unconscious realm. Freud invented it. And yet, Larry Krebs must be assuming then that for 19 centuries almost, 18 centuries, Christians never were able to help people at any degree other than at a superficial level.

I don't believe if Larry Krebs were here today, facing us, that he would be willing to say that. If I would say, Dr. Krebs, Larry's not a doctor, I don't think, just Larry. Larry, would you say to me that until Sigmund Freud came along, no person was ever helped by Christianity except at a superficial level.

Never was a heart changed. Never were motives transformed. Never was a person sanctified and made in purpose and in thought in the image of Christ.

This never happened before Freud came along. But it has happened since Freud because Freud has given us the keys to sanctification. Is this what you're saying? Of course, Larry Krebs would deny that.

But that's exactly what he's claiming. He says, until Christians get on to this Freudian bandwagon, we are doomed to give superficial counsel. I guess that's what Christians have always done before.

There was a Freudian bandwagon to get on. And yet he says, until we do that, psychotherapists, of course, people who are trained in psychology, with or without biblical foundations, that means even if they're total pagans, hate God, rebels against God, psychologically trained pagans, he says, will do a better job than the church of restoring troubled people to more effective functioning. There's the problem again.

Is the idea effective functioning? Is that the goal of Christianity, effective functioning? That's pragmatism. The goal of Christianity is to bring glory to God, even if in doing so, it means I have to be crushed like a grape on the sidewalk. That's not effective functioning.

But the purpose of Christianity is not for me to be happily well adjusted. I am, by the way, and I don't believe there's anything other than Christianity that's more likely to produce happiness and well adjusted behavior. I'm not trying to deny that that is an effect of Christianity.

I'm saying that is not what it's all about. What it's all about is God, not my mental comfort. And frankly, he's lying.

I shouldn't say lie. Forgive me. I shouldn't say lie.

A man is only lying if he knows he's telling an untruth. He probably is blind enough not to know that he's not telling the truth. When he says that psychotherapists without biblical foundations do a better job and get better results than people without psychotherapeutic training in helping people, that simply isn't true.

Psychotherapy gets about 5% success rate. We've already read that earlier. That is not great results.

With or without biblical foundations, psychotherapy is worthless or almost entirely worthless. And of course, it's even worse than worthless. It's damaging because it substitutes for the truth in the minds of many people even who were otherwise Christian in their thinking.

I believe that Christianity has 100% success rate when it is practiced. And it may be true that all the Christians in a certain area, as he says, or as Gary Collins says, may be, what do you say, incompetent counselors. It's true.

There may be some small towns with a few Christians where there's an incompetent counselor. But if they're incompetent, they're incompetent because they haven't read their Bible adequately. They haven't walked with God adequately.

It is not because they haven't studied psychology. In fact, if anything, the worst incompetence to be found among Christian counselors is found in their very adaptation of psychological concepts to the degree that they have bought in psychology. To that degree, they're probably incompetent to affect change because they have not yet understood what the problem is, much less what the solution is.

In an audio cassette called Psychotherapy Training and Outcome of Psychotherapy, researchers, I don't know the first names, Truax and Mitchell, said this, quote, From existing data, it would appear that only one out of three people entering professional training has the requisite interpersonal skills to prove helpful to patients. There is no evidence that the usual traditional graduate training program has any positive value in producing therapists who are more helpful than non-professionals. Unquote.

Now, what is that saying? What it's saying is that no more than one third of the people who study to become psychotherapists, no more than one third have what it takes to be helpful. And what it takes to be helpful is not gained by the training. What does it take? It takes interpersonal relationship skills.

And of all the people who enter into psychiatric or psychological studies to become therapists, this guy said the studies indicate about one in three have good interpersonal relationship skills, which is what it takes to be helpful to people when they have problems. Two thirds of people who enter that school don't have the skills, and it says the training doesn't give them that skills, which means that psychotherapists out there, by and large, are two thirds incompetent, even though trained, because their problems, their personal problems, dominate their lives. They can't relate to people properly.

Their interpersonal skills are hampered by their own moral and spiritual and emotional crippling. And that is clearly seen. I mean, all you have to do is go to a convention where there's a lot of psychotherapists or a lot of people who study psychology, and you say, man, I never saw such a group of misfits.

And I don't mean to say that rudely. It's just the case that misfits are attracted to that field. Now, some good people are attracted to it, too.

But according to this man, these two researchers, Truax and Mitchell, they say about two out of three people attracted to the field are misfits. They don't fit in well with society. They don't relate well with people.

About a third are reasonably good at it before they get their training. Does training help them? They were good before they went in. They have the personality skills and so forth.

Maybe they're Christians. Who knows? Martin and Dieter Bobgan, in their book, Prophets of Psychoheresy, book one, said this, quote, In comparing amateurs and professionals with respect to therapeutic effectiveness, Dr. Joseph Durlock found in 40 out of 42 studies that the results produced by amateurs were equal to or better than by the professionals. In a four-volume series called The Regulation of Psychotherapists, Dr. Daniel Hogan, a social psychologist at Harvard, analyzed the traits and qualities that characterize psychotherapists.

In half of the studies, amateurs did better than the professionals. Research psychiatrist Dr. Jerome Frank reveals the shocking fact that research has not proven that professionals produce better results than amateurs. Unquote.

Now, these various studies show that if you get some patients, so-called, people with life problems, and turn half of them over to trained professionals, half of them over to people who have no training at all, just caring people, who will talk to them, the people who are turned over to the amateurs do as well or better in recovery and in improvement as those who are given to the professionals. What does that tell you? Professional training doesn't add a thing to your competency to counsel, notwithstanding the denials of Larry Crabb and Gary Collins and such people as that who want to integrate this loser of a field, this pseudoscience, this lame philosophical bag of tricks. They want to integrate that with Christianity and somehow increase Christianity's effectiveness.

It's an absurdity. Dr. Joseph Durlach, reporting results of research which compared the effectiveness of professional psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers with that of paraprofessionals, that should mean non-professionals, people who have no training, who had zero to 15 hours of training. Here's what Dr. Joseph Durlach reported.

Quote, Overall, outcome results in comparative studies have favored the paraprofessionals, that means non-professionals, who had zero to 15 hours of training only. There were no significant differences among helpers in 28 investigations, but paraprofessionals were significantly more effective than professionals in 12 studies. In only one study were professionals significantly more effective than all paraprofessionals with whom they were compared.

The provocative conclusion from these comparative investigations is that professionals do not possess demonstrably superior therapeutic skills compared with paraprofessionals. Unquote. How are we doing for time? A few minutes? Let me read the rest of these quotes and we'll wind it down.

Ronald Schlensky, who's a forensic psychiatrist, in an article called Mental Health Fund Shift Scene in Santa Barbara News Press, January 3rd, 1980, Ronald Schlensky said, quote, Psychologists are no better than other citizens in predicting a human being's conduct. Unquote. Bernie Selbergeld, in his book, The Shrinking of America, which I quoted earlier from 1983, said, quote, Changes made by the presumably sophisticated methods of therapy are usually modest and not much different from what people achieve on their own or with the help of their friends.

Unquote. Dr. Joseph Wardis of the State University of New York, in a general discussion in a journal, Psychotherapy Research, I'm sorry, it's a book, Psychotherapy Research, he said, quote, The proposition of whether psychotherapy can be beneficial can be reduced to its simplest terms, of whether talk is very helpful. And that doesn't need to be researched.

It's self-evident that talk can be helpful. Unquote. In other words, psychotherapy is helpful for the same reason that talk is helpful.

Anyone who can talk can probably help people in some measure. Some people with problems and depression, anxiety, all they need is someone to talk to. It can be their parents, ideally, if they're Christian parents, or a Christian, a mature Christian, or some other friend.

But most people get better, or about the same percentage get better, whether they talk to a professional or not. Now, what does the Bible say? In Galatians 6, Paul said, Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye who are spiritual, restore such in one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. If a person is overtaken in a fault, let me tell you something.

People who go to psychiatrists and psychologists have faults. They're overcome. They're overtaken.

They're a victim. I don't really like that word very much. I mean, they have been overcome.

Let's put it that way. They've done so willingly, they may be fully responsible, but they are overtaken in a fault. Who is to help them? Psychiatrists? No.

You who are spiritual, restore such in one. That's an amazing thing, because Christian psychologist, Psychologist, Larry Crabb, said that psychotherapists with or without biblical foundations will do a better job than the church of restoring troubled people. And yet, Paul said, No, you who are spiritual are to restore such people.

Paul said to the church in general, in Romans 15 and 14, Ye also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, also able to admonish one another. The word admonish, the Greek word actually means to confront or to counsel. Paul said to the church, who are certainly not professionally trained, that they were, that sufficient goodness and knowledge, that they were able to counsel one another.

This is the verse that gave the title to J. Adams' book, Competent to Counsel, because one of the translations says it's competent to counsel one another. First Thessalonians 5, 14, and also verses 23 and 24, says, Now we exhort you, brethren, warn them that are unruly, comfort the feeble-minded, support the weak, be patient toward all men. Who? Brethren, Christians.

People are unruly, that is, they're ungoverned, ungovernable, feeble-minded, weak. What are we to do? We are to warn them, comfort them, support them, and be patient toward them. We, in other words, are to minister to them, not send them off to some unsaved professionals.

In Luke 10, 21, Jesus in that hour rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight. It does not require a wise and prudent, educated man to be a tool of God in the restoration of an erring person with behavior problems or mental problems.

God hides many things from wise and prudent, and reveals them to babes. It's clear how many Christian integrationists there are among the wise and the prudent, the highly educated, the ones who want to be respectable in the academic community, but they are blinded. They're hidden from them because they're not looking at the truth.

And if they speak not according to this word, said Isaiah, there's no light in them. But one who knows God and knows the truth can help people better than the most highly trained professional who does not have a clue as to what is the problem or who is the solution. Therefore, my argument is against integrating psychology and Christianity.