en the inside of a sanctuary in years - are reaching to the Bible to help heal emotional difficulties. In addition, Christians who are licensed counselors are relying on the Bible to help people through trying time (p. K6304).
At first glance, the marriage of counseling, which seeks to restore psychological harmony to the individual, and Christianity, with its emphasis on spiritual rightness and care for fellow human beings, would appear to be a felicitous combination. A more psychologically healthy person should be better able to reach spiritual levels that would allow him or her to achieve the state of grace that is the goal of Christian living. Families seeking counseling from an therapist who also shares basic tenets of their religious belief ought to be able to reap benefits beyond those offered by secular counseling or treatment programs that do not include an appreciation of their faith and its importance in their lives.
Yet a number of critics, many of them Christians themselves, have raised objections to combining the two approaches, arguing that this attempt to combine approaches actually represents a fundamental and insurmountable dichotomy. Steve Rabey (1996, September 16) details some of the primary criticisms and concerns regarding Christian counseling. Some theologians and other Christians looking at the field, he writes, "allege that Christian therapists are unbiblical in their counseling methods, that they undermine the local pastor's authority, and that they have unwittingly altered the Christian message away from confession of sin and the need for salvation toward the pursuit of self actualization" (p. 78). Many secular therapists struggle with the criticism that they may come to act as God, or at least as His priests, in the eyes of their patients; for the Christian therapist, this accusation can be especially inflammatory and damning.
Rabey (1996, September 16) divides the most important critics i...