The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context

“David Powlison has well served the church of Jesus Christ with this historical survey of the biblical counseling movement. His writing style is informative, engaging, and full of grace. You feel like an old friend is telling you a story by the fireside. At Faith, we consider this book to be so important that it will be a required textbook for several of our biblical counseling training programs.”

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“Understanding history enables us to make better sense of people’s ideas and practices. Biblical counseling has been around now for over forty years, and it has developed. This definitive and reflective examination of its origins in the story and work of its founder, Jay Adams, provides the necessary context to appreciate its important contributions to the Christian counseling world from a second–generation leader in the movement.”

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“David Powlison has written the definitive account of a biblical counseling movement that arose in the 1960s and continues to influence the field of Christian counseling today. The reader is taken on a journey through the historical development of nouthetic counseling, its origins, influences, theological content, organizational fault lines, and key figures. Powlison is not a dispassionate outsider. He is clear in what he believes, but he approaches his subject with such a thoroughness and fairness in his research and assessment that he will leave readers from all sides of the Christian counseling field with a new comprehension of the theological, philosophical, personal, social, and cultural components of the movement. This book is a must–read for anyone interested in understanding the rapid and turbulent growth occurring in faith–based counseling in the latter part of the twentieth century.”

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“David Powlison and I share a deep commitment to biblical counseling and to church history. Dr. Powlison unites these twin themes in his excellent work, The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context. Everyone interested in the modern biblical counseling movement over the past generation needs to read this well–researched and well–written book. This is a fair and balanced presentation of one of the most important movements in the evangelical church over the past forty years. Readers will be equipped not only with historical insight but, more importantly, with wisdom for how to speak the truth in love.”

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“I have watched with much interest the developments in Christian counseling over the past forty years. The issues discussed here are still very important, and this book is a good introduction to them. Even readers already familiar with this movement will learn new things. David’s book is entirely judicious, careful, and balanced in its treatment of Adams, his opponents, and the events affecting the biblical counseling movement. I hope the book attracts a large readership.”

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“It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this book. The ‘counseling wars’ of the past half century have ignited passions often characterized by labels rather than by careful analytic thought. This is the first broadly comprehensive history of these developments. Although Powlison is one of the important players, he takes extraordinary pains not to misrepresent those with whom he disagrees. Above all, while trying to be open to truth and insight whatever their source (after all, the reaches of common grace are vast), Powlison faithfully argues that the Christian faith must play a constitutive role in building a robust model of Christian counseling. Amen and Amen.”

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