Van Til’s Influence on Biblical Counseling

Jared Poulton joins Camden Bucey to discuss Van Til’s Counseling Movement: A Critical Analysis of Jay Adams and Biblical Counseling. They trace how Cornelius Van Til’s presuppositional apologetics supplied key theological instincts for Jay Adams and the modern biblical counseling movement, including the God-relatedness of every human problem, dependence upon divine revelation, and confidence in Scripture’s sufficiency for pastoral ministry.

Jared serves as Executive Director of the Institute for Reformed Biblical Counseling and as Pastor of Counseling and Teaching at Cornerstone United Reformed Church in Hudsonville, Michigan. He is also a visiting professor of biblical counseling at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary and holds a PhD in biblical counseling from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The conversation also examines tensions within contemporary biblical counseling. Camden and Jared consider the antithesis, common grace, the relation of the book of nature to the book of Scripture, and the danger of either rejecting all extra-biblical knowledge or baptizing secular methods without sufficient theological scrutiny. Throughout, they argue that faithful counseling should serve the church’s disciple-making mission and bring every claim about human life under the authoritative framework of God’s Word.

Resources

• Van Til’s Counseling Movement
• Institute for Reformed Biblical Counseling

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 03:12 Jared Poulton’s path into biblical counseling
• 09:12 What is biblical counseling?
• 17:44 The sufficiency of Scripture and pastoral counsel
• 23:09 CCEF, David Powlison, and Van Til
• 27:29 A Van Tillian foundation and an identity crisis
• 32:48 Competing trajectories in biblical counseling
• 41:02 Robert K. Rudolph and Jay Adams
• 44:02 Three streams that shaped Adams
• 50:57 God is man’s environment
• 55:58 Presuppositions and borrowed terminology
• 61:37 The antithesis and secular psychology
• 67:06 Scripture’s framework for counseling
• 72:59 Common grace and the two-book approach
• 75:56 Counseling in service of the church’s mission
• 77:42 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Poulton