The Fruit Of Biblical Counseling, Inc.

I’m not opposed to the concept of Christian psychology as a way to help people with various mental issues, but I’ve never seen it attempted. Secular psychology has failed to advance beyond pill-pushing, of course, despite having the benefit of being led by some of society’s most… ah… personally-aware-of-abnormal-psychology. We’ll cover one today! But the Churchian alternative is no better. It has faith healers, exorcists and Bible-thumpers galore, but a real Christian psychologist would advocate fatherhood, father-proxy organizations and organize teens against the now-legally-mandated sex perversions of the public schools those kids are incarcerated in.

You see the problem. All the science is settled: fatherlessness is the #1 psychological destabilizer across all demographics… but that way lies no happy, safe career path.

But it’s not too late to start. Let’s judge one Christian psychology association… the “Faith Biblical Counseling Ministries”, an international NGO promoting Christ as the answer to Freud… by their in-house consequences. Some context first:

The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context

h ttps://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/the-biblical-counseling-movement-history-and-context/

By Stehen Midgely for Themelios Magazine(?), Vol. 5, Issuse 3

When Christians struggle with life’s problems, who is best equipped to help them? Should we turn to churches and pastors or the expertise of the mental health professionals? This is the issue underpinning Powlison’s fascinating account of the biblical counseling movement. As ‘history’ it takes us from the origins of the movement in the 1960s through to the early 1990s. The ‘context’ concerns cultural issues in the church and world as well as the personal characteristics of some of the key actors. All had a bearing on the way the history played out.

At the start of what is an unusually readable adaption of a doctoral thesis…

Now a book available on Amazon.

…Powlison describes his intention to explore the biblical counseling movement in relation to the anti-psychiatry critics of the 1960s. In response to what they saw as the over-medicalization of life, writers like Rosenberg took issue with psychiatry for claiming jurisdiction over the ‘ordinary problems of life’. At much the same time, a pastor by the name of Jay Adams was becoming increasingly troubled by the ‘defer and refer’ attitude he saw developing in many churches. Mental health professionals were the ‘experts,’ and churches were increasingly handing responsibility for pastoral care to them. The biblical counseling movement Jay Adams helped to found opposed this trend. According to Adams, troubled people in the churches didn’t need mental health experts but pastors because the wisdom they needed wasn’t found in secular psychology but in the Bible.

No, the solutions to most psychiatric problems are not to be found in the Bible. Not directly. While God’s general plan for human behavior is greatly effective at preventing mental illnesses, how do you practically help a troubled youth dealing with hopelessness and a drug habit? You can’t prescribe him a new father then wave away the most formative years of his life. Biblical teachings can’t even help a guy overcome a phobia, one of secular psychiatry’s very few success stories.

I’m as Sola Scriptura as any Baptist, but that wasn’t the book I used to learn calculus.

Jay Adams hails from a Reformed Episcopal background. A mainline-to-evangelical switch in the 1960s, combined with education at Johns Hopkins University and the University Of Missouri, a Masonic institution and the state where the Freemasons jumped into evangelicalism, make him likely but not certain to be affiliated with them. It doesn’t help that John MacArthur has been a significant supporter of Adams’ counseling efforts.

It also doesn’t help that Adams’ undergrad degree was in the classics and his PhD in speech, not anything related to medical or social services. A career college kid learns a great deal about nothing, then sets himself up as an alternative to secular psychology that barely pretended to uphold Biblical norms for human behavior? Smells like either a trust-fund grifter baby and/or a Vietnam draft dodger.

The first main chapter describes influences that shaped Adams. It was a time when ‘the therapeutic was triumphant,’ when ‘psychiatry and psychotherapy [had] displaced the cure of souls, reifying the medical metaphor and so ordaining “secular pastoral workers” to take up the task’ (p. 22). Evangelical psychotherapists who wanted to take both Bible and psychotherapy seriously were setting about the task of ‘integration.’ Though unhappy with the ‘leave it to the experts’ message, it was only when Adams encountered the anti-psychiatrist Mowrer that his concerns were crystallized. In Adams’ own words, ‘Mowrer did two things for me. First he destroyed the Freudian system in my mind.… Second … he shook my faith in the mental health professionals.… He gave me confidence to go forward’ (p. 36).

That would be Orval Hobart Mowrer… BOOM! Unholy Homewreckers, Batman, he’s Illuminati and a half!

h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orval_Hobart_Mowrer

Mowrer spent his early years on the family farm near Unionville, Missouri. His father retired from farming and moved the family to town when Hobart reached school age. The death of the elder Mowrer when Hobart was 13 changed his life radically.

Fatherless. Not a good sign for emotional stability, although father-death is much less traumatic for children than divorce.

A year later he suffered the first in a series of major depressions which would recur throughout his life. Nevertheless, he did well in high school and entered the University of Missouri in 1925. Having decided on psychology as a career, he became laboratory assistant to the university's first and only psychology professor, Max Friedrich Meyer. Meyer had earned a PhD in physics before emigrating from Germany in the 1890s and was a rigorous behaviorist. Although Mowrer's initial hope was that psychology would help him to understand himself and his own problems…

A common reason why secular psychologists chose their career paths, I’m told.

…he readily adapted to Meyer's behavioral approach. Mowrer began his college years as a conservative Christian, but lost his faith as he adopted progressive and scientific views prevalent in academia.

Similarly, that’s also a common reaction to “a liberal arts education”.

In his senior year, as a project for a sociology course, Mowrer composed a questionnaire to investigate sexual attitudes among students. It was distributed anonymously and the responses were to be returned anonymously. The questionnaire was accompanied by a letter from a non-existent "Bureau of Personnel Research" which began:

“Dear University Student:

“During the last several decades it has become increasingly apparent that there is something seriously wrong with the traditional system of marriage in this country. But, unfortunately, the whole matter has been so inextricably bound up with religious dogmas, moral sentiments, and all manner of prudish conventionalities as to make it exceedingly difficult to ascertain with any degree of accuracy the precise reasons for this situation.

Mowrer didn’t just lose his faith. That attitude is anti-Christianity, not atheism.

There were slight differences in wording between the questionnaires sent to women and those sent to men, but each contained 11 groups of questions requesting the student's opinions about illicit sexual relations, whether the student would marry a person who had engaged in sexual relations, how s/he would react to unfaithfulness in marriage, whether s/he had engaged in sex play as a child or sexual relations as an adult, and whether s/he would favor the legal establishment of "trial marriage" or "companionate marriage.”

Some of the students sent the questionnaires on to their parents, who complained to the administration. Two faculty members were aware of the questionnaire and allowed it to be distributed, sociology professor Harmon O. DeGraff and psychology professor Max Friedrich Meyer, although neither had read the cover letter. Ultimately both men lost their jobs, and Meyer never held an academic position again. The American Association of University Professors censured the University for violation of academic freedom, in the first such action taken by the AAUP.

The University was absolutely in the right. Mowrer was a spiteful mutant, not a researcher, and he was trying to destroy families from his second year as a student.

The scandal had little impact on Mowrer's career. He left the university without a degree in 1929 (the degree was granted a few years later)…

That was odd. His ethics violation were so extreme that his mentor was fired, then he graduates honorary after the fact? I smell malevolent lawsuit.

…entering Johns Hopkins University, where he worked under Knight Dunlap.

In 1936, Mowrer was hired by the Yale Institute of Human Relations, then a relatively new project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, as an instructor.

He was duly recruited. Perhaps for his sadism:

During the late 1930s Mowrer began experimenting with the use of electric shock as a conditioning agent. At the time, most psychologists agreed with William James that fear (in this usage, synonymous with anxiety) was an instinctive response. Mowrer suspected fear was a conditioned response and designed a way to create fear in the laboratory. The unusually generous funding available at the institute allowed him to use human subjects for the first time.

I always wondered where third-world warlords got the idea, to induce cooperation via jumper cables applied to the nipples. Turns out, from behavioral psychologists funded by Rockefeller!

Sheesh, don’t look so surprised.

In 1944 Mowrer became a psychologist at the Office of Strategic Services developing assessment techniques for potential intelligence agents.

In 1948, Hobart Mowrer accepted a research-only position at the University of Illinois and moved to Urbana, Illinois…

Chicago: Ground Zero for the Freemason faction that infiltrated the evangelical church.

Mowrer's primary achievements in learning theory followed from his work with aversive conditioning or avoidance learning.

He specialized in the psychology of torture. Fortunately for humanity, God struck him down:

In 1953, at the height of his career and on the eve of accepting the presidency of the American Psychological Association, he suffered the worst psychological collapse of his life. He was hospitalized for three and a half months with depression complicated by symptoms resembling psychosis. Few effective treatments were available. A few years later, Mowrer was successfully treated with one of the first tricyclic antidepressants.

[Mowrer] died by suicide in 1982 at the age of 75.

He was able to acquire funding from the Lilly Endowment for a fellowship in morality and mental health.

If wikipedia is to be believed, Lilly has more philanthropic wealth than the Gates Foundation. $10b as of 2014, reportedly. And yes, it’s from the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical companies. Methinks medical behaviorism is still in vogue amongst the Skull & Bones set.

The program brought students from seminaries and divinity schools (among others, Jay E. Adams) to Champaign-Urbana, where they learned Mowrer's counseling and group techniques.

Mowrer developed the same group-behavior-modification that was used by Henrietta Mears and her Los Angeles acolytes for “group Bible studies”. The ultimate result was… I want to say benign, they eventually gave up on the technique… but then Adams picked up Mowrer’s version of small-group reeducation methods and made himself a cottage industry of Biblical counseling. “Faith-based”, of course.

So, Adams was trained at U.Chicago… under OSS veteran Mowrer… as well as Hopkins and U.Missouri? I’m convinced he was, indeed, Freemason.

So, how is Adams’ model of Biblical Counseling(tm) working out for his successors? Exactly as well as his mentor Mowrer’s suicide would predict.

Biblical Counseling Movement Leader Ousted From Pulpit

h ttps://ministrywatch.com/biblical-counseling-movement-leader-ousted-from-pulpit/

By Tony Mator, 24 October 2024

Faith Church, a multi-campus church in Lafayette, Indiana, announced it has removed its senior pastor, Steve Viars, from leadership due to circumstances surrounding his recent separation from his wife.

“The pastors and deacons of Faith Church requested and accepted the resignation of our leader of 37 years, Pastor Steve Viars, on 10/17/2024. His marriage condition does not meet the biblical qualifications for being an elder,” the church said in an online statement. “Please pray for the Viars family and Faith Church during this time of transition.”

Hmm. A legal separation, by itself, shouldn’t be an immediate & permanent disqualifier for service. Marital stress happens. If Viars is dependent on his pastorhood for his income, a safe assumption after 37 years of service, then publicly firing & disgracing him is the best way to destroy Viars’ marriage permanently, short of livestream-boning his wife. This Halloween, rob the grave instead of the cradle!

Viars and Faith Church are prominent names in the biblical counseling movement. During his time as senior pastor, Viars headed the church’s Faith Biblical Counseling Ministries. He continues to be listed as a board member for the Biblical Counseling Coalition.

*GQ checks link* Nope, he’s gone there too, as of Oct. 28.

According to an Oct. 18 email from church leaders (copied to MinistryWatch by church member Christopher Hutton), the pastors and deacons learned of Viars’ marital problems on Sept. 15 and began investigating why his wife, Kris, had moved out of their home.

“These investigations have revealed a story that is sad on many different levels and has led our deacons and pastors to determine that Steve Viars is no longer qualified to serve as a pastor of Faith Church,” the email read. “This has been a difficult situation and certainly is not the outcome we would have desired. The pastors and deacons have requested Steve Viars’ resignation, and Steve has agreed to resign. This is effective immediately.”

The following Sunday, church leadership provided more details to the congregations at all three campuses, but fell short of naming the specific actions that were deemed disqualifying.

“Five weeks ago today, Kris Viars sent every pastor and deacon an email informing us that she left the home with [their son] Andrew to an undisclosed location and requested help confronting Steve for his unloving treatment toward her. To our knowledge, there was no physical violence or sexual immorality,” the church explained in a prepared statement Hutton forwarded to MinistryWatch.

Soooo…

SHE chose to move out.

SHE publicly denounced him.

SHE chose to involve their son. (Maybe adoption? Mr. Viars is very elderly to have an <18yo son.)

SHE did so without being able to claim any violence or immorality.

Therefore, the entire church leadership across all campuses immediately and publicly blamed

HIM.

With only a single witness to establish the matter, which was not Biblical at all. Oh wait, he testified against himself:

The church also read aloud Viars’ resignation letter.

He better have given them permission for that.

“Pastors are held to high standards and rightly so,” Viars wrote. “I do not believe my current family situation meets those biblical standards and I therefore am tendering my resignation as your senior pastor. Thankfully this does not involve a moral issue, but my failures and challenges are serious enough that it is best that I work on them apart from the rigors and requirements of pastoral ministry. Please pray for me, Kris and Andrew in the coming days.”

A successor to Viars has not yet been announced, but Faith Church says it “will follow its constitution to select interim leadership and the next senior pastor.”

Viars took the helm of Faith Church in 1996 as the successor to William Goode, another prominent figure in the biblical counseling movement.

Goode can be linked to the Biblical Counseling of John MacArthur’s church.

Goode established Faith Biblical Counseling Ministries in 1977; and in 1985, he developed the Biblical Counseling Training Conference, which has trained many thousands of individuals, including pastors, missionaries, church leaders and lay Christians.

Today, Faith Church boasts many other ministries in addition to its focus on counseling. These include, among others, a Christian school, seminary, senior living community and emergency shelter for displaced families.

Protestant seminaries are an abomination even in concept. The pattern Christ set was in-person apprenticeship, not a gatekeeping institution.

Viars didn’t have the Internet in 1996, but he certainly did today. How could he pass himself as an expert in Biblical Counseling without ever learning about the fatherless, Christ-hating OSS torturer whose psychological research provided the basis for what he taught? Was he never curious who first developed the methods he used?

I see Viars publicly opposed a conversion therapy ban in West Lafayette in 2022, so he wasn’t a black hat himself. Regardless, he taught ‘Biblical Counseling’ for 37 years but never learned to fight the devil.

Hmm, he’s a really old guy with a really longstanding marriage to suffer a ‘gray divorce’. I’ve never before heard of such a high-level pastor being removed with the admission that he’d done nothing wrong! One wonders if the Cabal needs the considerable resources he controlled… or if despite my pessimism, he really was holding the line against Cultural Marxism.

Either way, he quit at the first shot.