Christians have long affirmed that knowing Jesus Christ is the original and abiding cure of the soul, yet churches have not always provided thoughtful, skilled, and personalized care for those facing spiritual, emotional, and relational struggles.
Over the past 150 years, psychiatry and psychotherapy increasingly filled that role, offering secular explanations and methods for understanding and treating human distress without recourse to Scripture or Christ.
Beginning in the late 1960s, a biblical counseling movement sought to reclaim counseling as a responsibility of the church and to provide a distinctly Christian alternative to mainstream psychiatric and psychotherapeutic approaches. In The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context, David A. Powlison traces how the movement began, how it developed, the ideas that shaped it, and the tensions that emerged both within the movement and in its interactions with evangelical psychotherapists.
Powlison combines careful historical scholarship with firsthand insight as a major participant in the movement. The core chapters began as his Ph.D. dissertation in the history of science and medicine; this edition adds an extended appendix of articles that deepen the analysis of developments within biblical counseling and its relationship to evangelical psychotherapy.
Product Details
- Author: David A. Powlison
- Publisher: New Growth Press
- Format: Paperback, 352 pages
- Dimensions: 8.5 x 10.5 x 0.7 inches
