take a seat

chapter one

take a seat

Take a seat. Tell me about your childhood. You know the scene before I finish describing it, because it lives in a thousand films and a million jokes, and because it may well be a scene from your own week. The therapeutic model has become so total, so much the assumed background of modern life, that we have stopped being able to imagine that human beings ever lived, and suffered, and healed, any other way. But they did, for all of human history until about a hundred years ago, and it is worth remembering that this whole apparatus is very new, and very Western, and was built on a particular set of beliefs about what a human being is, beliefs that a Christian has every reason to examine before lying down and making himself comfortable.

And let me put some numbers to how total it has become, because the scale of it is genuinely staggering. In the United States, by recent government figures, more than one in ten adults, some 11%, are taking a prescription medication for depression, and among women the figure is better than one in seven. Over a single recent decade the measured prevalence of depression rose by 60%. Look at a room of ten women in your church and understand that, statistically, one or two of them are medicated for their sadness, and more are in therapy, and nearly all of them have been taught to narrate their inner lives in the vocabulary of the couch. This is not a fringe. It is the sea we are all swimming in.¹

We have stopped being able to imagine that human beings ever suffered, and healed, any other way.

Now hear me carefully at the outset, because everything depends on my not being misheard here. I am not saying that sadness is not real, or that suffering is not real, or that the human mind cannot break in genuine and terrible ways. It can. I am not mocking the person in real anguish, and I am not telling anyone to throw away a medication their doctor has given them. That is not my subject and not my place. My subject is the whole vast system of thought that has grown up around human suffering, the therapeutic worldview, and the specific and disastrous thing that happened when the church, instead of testing that worldview against the Word, simply baptized it and welcomed it in. That is the thing I mean to examine, and I mean to examine it without flinching.

Because here is what I have come to believe, and what I want to lay before you and prove from the Scripture across these pages. The therapeutic culture is not a neutral set of tools. It is a rival faith, with a rival account of what you are, what is wrong with you, and what will make you whole. And when you understand that, you understand why it cannot simply be married to Christianity with a few verses sprinkled over the top. You cannot serve two gospels. So take a seat, yes, but not on their couch. Take a seat here, with the Word open, and we will reason it through together.

chapter two

babylonian wisdom

I have to begin by drawing a distinction that the whole argument turns on, so let me draw it carefully, because if you grasp this one thing the rest follows almost on its own. It is the question of when a person’s worldview matters to their work, and when it does not.

Consider a Christian who is an engineer. Does his faith change the load-bearing calculation for a bridge? It does not. The steel bears what the steel bears, and a Muslim engineer and an atheist engineer and a Christian engineer, if they are all competent, will run the same numbers and get the same answer, because the strength of steel is not a matter of worldview. Or consider a Christian who is a surgeon setting a broken bone. His faith does not change how the fracture knits; the bone heals the same way in a believing patient and an unbelieving one. In work like that, a man’s worldview touches his ethics, how honest he is, how he treats people, whether he cuts corners, but it does not touch the actual content of the work, because the content is worldview-neutral. Steel and bone do not care what you believe. And that is exactly why a Christian can labor in those fields with a clear conscience.

Steel and bone do not care what you believe. The soul is not steel, and it is not a bone.

But now consider psychology, and everything changes, because psychology is not that kind of field at all. Here the worldview is not a bystander to the work; the worldview is the work. For psychology exists to answer exactly three questions: what is a human being, what is wrong with him, and what will make him whole. And those are not neutral, technical questions with answers you can measure in a laboratory. They are the deepest questions there are, and they are, at bottom, religious questions. Every answer psychology gives to them is a theological answer, whether it admits it or not. So when you take up a school of psychology, you are not picking up a neutral tool like a wrench. You are picking up an entire doctrine of man, of sin, and of salvation.²

And whose doctrine is it? Look at the men who built the thing. Sigmund Freud, an atheist, who held that religion was an illusion and a neurosis and that man is driven at bottom by buried animal urges. Carl Jung, a mystic who waded in the occult and the pagan gods. Carl Rogers, who taught that man is basically good and needs only to be accepted without judgment to flower into his true self. Abraham Maslow, whose famous pyramid places self-actualization, the fulfillment of the self, at the very summit of human need, as the thing we are all climbing toward. These are the fathers of the field. And notice that not one of them built on the Scripture, and every one of them built a system whose account of man flatly contradicts it.

For here is the rival gospel, laid out plainly. The Bible says man is fallen, a sinner by nature, and that his deepest problem is sin against a holy God. The therapeutic gospel says man is basically good, and that his deepest problem is woundedness, unmet needs, low self-esteem, or the damage others have done to him. The Bible says the cure is repentance and faith, dying to self and being remade in the image of Christ. The therapeutic gospel says the cure is self-acceptance, self-actualization, self-love, the lifting of guilt and the affirmation of the self exactly as it is. Do you see that these are not two compatible systems with a few surface disagreements? They are two rival religions. They disagree about what you are, what is wrong with you, and what will save you. On every question that matters, they give opposite answers.³

You cannot integrate two gospels. One of them has to be lying about what you are.

And this is why the thing that is called Christian counseling, in its dominant, integrationist form, is built on sand. Its whole project is to take this secular psychology, this Babylonian system, and integrate it with the Bible, to marry the two and keep the best of both. But you cannot integrate two gospels. You cannot bolt a doctrine that says man is basically good onto a book that says man is fallen and call the weld sound. What actually happens, every time, is that the secular system becomes the real foundation, the thing that is genuinely believed and genuinely relied upon, and the Scripture becomes a decoration laid over the top, a few verses quoted for comfort while the actual diagnosis and the actual cure come from Freud and Rogers and Maslow. It is Babylonian wisdom with a cross painted on the door. And a Christian ought to be able to see that, and to say it.

chapter three

what the bible calls counsel

Someone will say to me, but the Bible itself speaks of counsel, of counselors, of getting wise counsel; are you against that? And the answer is no, not in the least. The Bible speaks of counsel constantly, and warmly, and commends it. But we have to actually look at what the Scripture means by the word, because it turns out to mean something very different from the modern therapeutic thing that has borrowed its name, and the difference is the whole point.

Go to the Hebrew of the Old Testament. The word is yaʿats, to advise, to counsel, to guide, and the counsel itself is ʿetsah. And what is it? It is the wise giving direction to those who need it, always measured against the purpose of God. Proverbs sets it out exactly: there are many plans in a person’s heart, but it is the counsel, the ʿetsah, of the Lord that stands. And the highest use of the word points straight to Christ, for Isaiah calls the coming Messiah Pele Yoetz, the Wonderful Counselor, and says of the Lord Himself that He is wonderful in counsel and excellent in wisdom. Counsel, in the Hebrew, is wisdom from God, brought to bear on a human life, and its very fountainhead is God Himself.⁴

“There are many devices in a man’s heart; nevertheless the counsel of the LORD, that shall stand.”

– Proverbs 19:21

Go now to the Greek of the New Testament, and it becomes sharper still, because there is a specific word for the personal work of helping a soul, and it is nouthesia, with its verb noutheteo. It means to admonish, to instruct, to put a thing into the mind, to lay it on the heart. It is used around a dozen times, and if you gather up every place it appears, you find something striking: it is always the ministry of God’s people to one another, by means of God’s truth, for the sake of Christlikeness. Paul tells the Colossians to admonish one another in all wisdom. He tells the Thessalonians to admonish the unruly. He warns the Ephesian elders that for three years he did not cease to admonish everyone, night and day, with tears. This is the biblical model of soul-care, and notice what it is: it is warm, it is personal, it is full of concern, and it is saturated, from beginning to end, in the Word of God.⁵

And here is the verse that ought to settle it, where Paul tells an ordinary church, not a class of professionals, that they are competent to do this for one another. Full of goodness, filled with knowledge, and, he says, able to counsel, to admonish, one another. That single verse is the seed of what has rightly been called biblical counseling, the recovery, in our own time, of the plain truth that the cure of souls belongs to the Word of God and the people of God. It was set out most sharply two generations ago in Jay Adams’s book Competent to Counsel, which took its very title from this verse and argued, rightly, that the Scriptures are sufficient for the soul’s troubles and that the church had no business handing its people over to a rival system.⁶

“And I myself also am persuaded of you, my brethren, that ye also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another.”

– Romans 15:14

The qualification for counsel, in the Bible, is not a degree. It is wisdom, and godliness, and love.

So do you see what the biblical counselor actually is? It is not a credentialed professional who has been trained in a secular system and licensed by the state. It is a wise, godly person, usually an older and more seasoned one, who loves you and who brings the truth of God to bear on your life. That is the qualification: not a diploma from a Babylonian college, but wisdom, and godliness, and love. The church spent nineteen centuries knowing this, and helping its wounded this way, before it lost its nerve and decided that the real help must be somewhere out there in the professional guild, and that the pastor and the wise old saint had nothing to offer but a pat on the hand.

This points you to what you should actually do, practically, when your soul is in trouble, whether it is a private grief, or a hard marriage, or a struggle you cannot see your way through. Do not run first to the couch. Go and find the wise, godly, seasoned believers who love you, the ones who are in the Word themselves and whose walk with the Lord has proven sound over years, and open your trouble to them, and let them bring the Scripture to bear on it. I will tell you plainly: in almost any faithful church you can find such people, if you will look, an older woman who has walked with God through her own valleys, a seasoned couple, a pastor who knows his Bible and knows you. And if you truly cannot find a single such soul in your church, that tells you something important about where you are planted, and you should go and find a church where you can, because a congregation with no wise elders to counsel its young is a congregation in trouble.

chapter four

the couch that replaced the village

I want to stay on this a while longer, because there is something underneath the whole therapeutic model that almost no one notices, and once you see it you cannot un-see it. This booklet is not about marriage, and I do not mean to turn it into a marriage book, but marriage is where the thing shows itself most plainly, so let me use it as the window and ask you to look through it at something much larger. The something larger is this: the therapist did not merely replace the pastor. He replaced the family, and the village, and the whole community of people who used to know you.

For thousands of years, across the Christian nations and long before them, when a husband and wife came into trouble, they had somewhere to go, and it was not a stranger’s office. They had parents, and aunts and uncles, and older married couples, and the elders of the church, a dense and living web of people who actually knew them, who had known them for years, who were bound to them by blood and love and loyalty, and who would still be standing beside them in ten years and at their gravesides in fifty. That was the structure God built for the helping of a struggling soul: people with real knowledge of you and real stakes in you. And it worked, quietly, for age upon age, with no couch and no credential in sight.⁷

The therapist did not win on merit. He moved into the empty house that the demolished community left behind.

Then the modern world took that structure apart. It scattered families across continents, hollowed out the churches, dissolved the neighbourhoods, and left the individual standing alone, siloed, with no net beneath him. And into that emptiness walked the professional, the paid stranger in a rented hour, who has no history with you, no bond to you, no place at your table, and no stake whatever in whether your marriage survives, and the culture announced this as progress. Do not burden your family, we are told; see a professional. But hear what that really means. It means the community that used to do this work has been demolished, and a stranger for hire is the only thing left standing in the rubble. The therapist did not win because he was better than your grandmother and your elders. He won because they were taken away from you, and he moved into the empty house.

And notice the false choice buried in it, because it hides a sin no one wants to name. The question is put to you as: should you take your marriage troubles to your family, or to a professional? But that is a rigged question, because pouring out complaints about your spouse to anyone at all, family or therapist or friend, is already the wrong first move. The Lord gave the order plainly: if your brother trespass against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. You go to each other first. Only if the two of you genuinely cannot hear one another do you bring in the wise and godly who love you both, and even then not to take your side or to collect sympathy, but to help you reconcile. What the world frames as family versus professional quietly skips the first and hardest step, and dresses up a bad habit, running your husband down to a sympathetic outside ear, as though it were the pursuit of health.⁸

And here is where it cuts closest to home, because the rot did not stay out in the world; it came inside, and the church built its own version of the very thing. Look at what we have made: pastoral counseling turned into a formal profession, and, above all, the great modern machinery of pre-marital counseling, the mandatory sessions, the required curriculum, the you must come through my office and complete the program before I will agree to marry you. I want to be fair about this, and precise, because I am not saying a pastor should not give counsel; the elders of the church admonishing and guiding their people is biblical and good and ancient. What I am saying is that we took the therapeutic model, the soul-help delivered as a professional service, in scheduled sessions, by a credentialed expert, and we swapped the licensed therapist for the pastor and called it ministry. It is the same machine with churchier paint. And I will tell you honestly that a Bible teacher I loved and learned from, many years ago, was fond of this model and thought it right; I do not think he did it in bad faith for a moment. But I have come to believe the premise itself is flawed, and that sincere men inherited a broken thing and never thought to question it.

And once you know a little history, the whole thing comes apart in your hands, because pre-marital and marriage counseling turn out to be answering a question the old world never had to ask. For most of human history, when two people married, two families were joining, and those families already knew each other, the values, the character, the faith, the reputation, watched over years and sometimes generations. The compatibility check that six scheduled sessions now scramble to perform had already been done, continuously and for free, by the community itself. And the ongoing help was already there, in that same web of people who knew them both. There was no need for a professional program, because the entire function it claims to serve was being carried, and carried better, by people with actual knowledge and actual stakes. Marriage counseling as a profession is barely a century old; its first centers opened in America around 1930, grown in no small part from the ugly soil of the eugenics movement, and even its own historians admit that couples turned to it only as they stopped relying on family and community. It is a manufactured replacement for something that was taken away.⁹

A pastor at a large church who has known a couple for a few months cannot truly counsel their marriage. He does not know them.

Think it through and the flaw becomes plain. A pastor at a large church who has known a couple for a matter of months is in no position to counsel their marriage in any deep and real sense, for the simple reason that he does not know them. So what can the program actually be? A curriculum. A questionnaire. A set of generic sessions delivered to near-strangers by a near-stranger, which is to say the therapeutic model exactly, only relocated to a church office. The very fact that it had to be invented is the proof of what I am telling you: it exists to simulate, badly and in six weeks, the deep knowing that an embedded community once provided freely and over a lifetime. We did not need a program. We needed what we tore down, and instead of rebuilding it, we built a professional imitation and called the imitation ministry.

And do you see that none of this is finally about marriage at all? It is about a whole civilization that pulled the individual loose from every bond that used to hold and know and help him, and left him alone, and then sold him a paid substitute for the thing it had stolen. This is true of marriage, and it is just as true of friendship, and of every other trouble a soul can fall into. And it is worth saying plainly that this atomized way of living is the strange thing, the anomaly, not the norm. It is not the model God built, not the way He ordered Israel with its families and elders and tightly woven life, and not even how most of the world still lives today. It is the peculiar invention of the modern West, and we have mistaken our own oddity for the way things simply are. You cannot see any of this, by the way, unless you know some history, and some Scripture, and something of how human beings have actually lived across time. That is why almost no one notices it. They have never known any world but this one.

So let me give you a plain word of counsel, and then lift it up to where it belongs. In your romantic attachments, and in your friendships too, involve the people who love you and know you. If you have family, bring them in; if you have no family worth the name, then go and gather a found family, godly people who will stand in that place for you. And when it comes to marriage, know the other person’s people, because when you marry someone you are marrying their family, their whole web and history and inheritance; that is simply the reality, so walk into it with your eyes open. That is wisdom, and it is the wisdom the couch cannot give you, because the couch, by design, knows no one and belongs to no one.

But here is the ground it all rests on, and the note I want to leave ringing under everything else in this chapter. Christ is sufficient. His Word is sufficient. It truly holds everything you need for the whole of a life, for the good times and the bad, for the marriage and the friendship and the private grief and the sleepless fear. The God who made you will guide you, really and actually guide you, as you walk in obedience to Him and grow in Him and keep yourself in His Word; He has promised it and He does not lie. Everything the therapeutic age sells is finally a substitute for a sufficiency the church already had and forgot it was holding. We went digging in Babylon for a wisdom that was ours all along. It was ours all along.

chapter five

the pathologizing of everything

I want to turn now to a thing that is not merely my opinion, and not merely a Christian complaint, but a documented and growing alarm being sounded by secular experts inside the field itself. It is this: that the modern therapeutic culture has taken the ordinary experiences of being a human being, the normal griefs and fears and sorrows and restlessness that belong to every life that has ever been lived, and relabeled them as disorders to be diagnosed and medicated. It has pathologized normal life.

And you need not take this from me, a preacher. Take it from Dr. Allen Frances, who is about as far from a religious crank as a man can get. He is the psychiatrist who chaired the task force that wrote the fourth edition of the field’s own diagnostic manual, the DSM, the very book that defines what counts as a mental disorder. He was, quite literally, one of the men who drew the lines. And he has spent his later years sounding the alarm, in his book Saving Normal and everywhere else he can, that the profession has slid into what he calls diagnostic inflation, converting, in his words, millions of normal people into mental patients. He warns that ordinary grief at the death of a loved one has been reclassified so that it can be diagnosed as Major Depressive Disorder, that ordinary childhood temper and distraction get turned into disorders, that the whole system is medicalizing the normal range of human life.¹⁰

The man who chaired the field’s own diagnostic manual now warns it is converting millions of normal people into mental patients.

Follow the numbers, because they tell the tale. Antidepressant use in America has climbed and climbed; better than one in ten adults now takes a medication for depression, and among some groups of women it approaches one in four. Frances points out that something like 6% of Americans are now addicted to prescription drugs, and that there are more emergency-room visits and more deaths tied to legal prescription drugs than to illegal street ones. He writes that we have far too much faith in pills and far too little trust in resilience, in time, and in the ordinary healing that God built into the human frame. A believer reading that should hear an echo, because the Scripture said it long before the psychiatrist did: that there is a time to weep and a time to mourn, that weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning, that the God who made us made us to heal.¹¹

Think hard about what this means, because it is a spiritual catastrophe dressed up as medical progress. A whole generation has been taught to see the normal weather of the soul, the sadness, the worry, the grief, the discontent, as symptoms of an illness rather than as the ordinary experience of a human being living in a fallen world. And once you have been taught to see your sorrow as a malfunction, you will naturally seek a technician to fix it, and a chemical to silence it, rather than asking the older and deeper questions: Why am I grieving? What is this sorrow trying to tell me? What in my life, or my heart, or my walk with God, is out of joint? The pathologizing of normal life does not merely mislabel the soul’s troubles. It cuts a person off from the very questions that might have led them to God.

chapter six

anxious, and in the bible

Let me show you something that the therapeutic age has made us nearly blind to: that the Bible is full, from cover to cover, of exactly these experiences we now rush to medicate, and that it treats them not as malfunctions to be silenced but as real conditions of the soul with real causes and real cures. The people of God, the great ones, the ones He loved and used, were anxious, and depressed, and afraid, and in anguish, and the Scripture records it plainly and deals with it honestly.

Think of Elijah, the mighty prophet, who had just called down fire from heaven, collapsing the very next chapter under a juniper tree and asking God to let him die. Think of David, whose Psalms are one long unflinching record of the troubled soul: why art thou cast down, O my soul, and why art thou disquieted within me? Think of Job on his ash-heap, of Jeremiah called the weeping prophet, of Hannah in bitterness of soul, of the Lord Jesus Himself in Gethsemane, sorrowful unto death and sweating as it were great drops of blood. These are not stories of chemical imbalance. They are the record of real souls in real anguish, and the Bible neither mocks their pain nor medicates it away. It takes it seriously, and it brings God to bear on it.¹²

The Bible neither mocks the soul’s anguish nor medicates it away. It takes it seriously, and it brings God to bear on it.

And notice, when you read these accounts closely, that the anguish very often has a cause, and that naming the cause is the beginning of the cure. Sometimes the trouble was inflicted from outside, as when David was hunted, or Job was stripped of everything. But sometimes, and this is the part the therapeutic age will never tell you, the anguish flowed from the person’s own sin, or fear, or flight from God, and the cure was not to affirm them but to turn them back. Consider Jonah, running from the call of God and sinking into a despair so deep he wished to die, whose misery was the direct fruit of his rebellion, and whose healing lay not in validation but in obedience. Consider the man who has stopped trusting God’s protection and is therefore eaten alive by fear, whose cure is not to have his fear affirmed but to be led back to faith: why are ye so fearful, the Lord asked the disciples in the storm, how is it that ye have no faith? A physician who only ever silences the symptom and never asks after the cause is no physician at all.¹³

Let me be careful and fair here, because I am not saying every sorrow is a sin, and I am not saying the body has nothing to do with it. That would be false, and cruel. The body is real, and the body is fallen, and it genuinely affects the soul. There are true bodily and hormonal disorders that press hard upon the mind, a thyroid gone wrong, the crash after childbirth, the great hormonal storms of a woman’s life, and these are real, physical, body-doctor matters, and there is no shame whatever in treating the body when the body is what is broken. I would never tell a suffering person to despise medicine or to throw away what a good physician has genuinely and wisely given. Hear that clearly.

But that honest carve-out is a world away from what the therapeutic culture has done, which is to take the whole vast territory of the soul, the griefs and fears and sorrows that are spiritual and not merely chemical, and to reclassify all of it as bodily malfunction to be drugged into quiet. The Scripture will not let us do that. It insists that the soul is real, that its troubles are often spiritual, that they often have a cause worth finding, and that the God who made the soul is the one who truly heals it. And it calls us, gently but firmly, to ask the deeper question before we reach for the bottle: not merely how do I make this feeling stop, but what is this feeling, and what is it telling me, and what would God have me do with it.

chapter seven

what they stopped believing in

There is one more thing I must raise, and it is the sharpest of all, and it cuts straight to whether the Christian who has married himself to secular psychology actually believes his own Bible. It is the matter of the unseen realm, of the demonic, and of spiritual warfare.

Open the Gospels and you cannot go three pages without meeting it. The Lord Jesus casts out demons constantly; it is one of the most common features of His entire ministry. He confronts unclean spirits, He frees the oppressed and the tormented, He gives His disciples authority over them. The New Testament plainly teaches that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against spiritual wickedness in high places. This is not a fringe doctrine tucked into a corner of Scripture. It runs straight through the middle of it. Any account of human suffering that has no place for it is not a biblical account, whatever verses have been sprinkled on top.¹⁴

Were people truly demonized in the Bible, and then, in the modern West, it simply stopped? Or did we merely stop believing in it, and rename it?

Now here is the question that ought to stop the integrationist cold. The secular psychologist, by the very commitments of his field, does not believe in the demonic at all. To him it is superstition, a pre-scientific label for what he would call psychosis or dissociation or personality disorder. So ask yourself: what happens when a Christian takes that secular framework as his foundation? He inherits its blindness. He is handed a system built by men who flatly deny a category the Bible plainly affirms. And so he must either quietly stop believing what the Scripture teaches about the unseen realm, or he must perform an impossible splice, holding a naturalistic system that has no room for demons in one hand and a Bible full of them in the other, and hoping no one asks how they fit.

It presses even harder than that. Were human beings genuinely afflicted by evil spirits in the first century, and then, at some tidy point, in the enlightened modern West, that simply ceased? Did the powers of darkness retire? Or is it far more likely that the affliction is with us still, and that we have merely stopped believing in it, and given its symptoms new and respectable clinical names, and reached for a prescription where the church once reached for prayer and fasting and the authority of the name of Christ? I am not saying, hear me, that every torment is demonic; the Scripture itself distinguishes the demonized from the merely sick, and so must we, with great care and no wild-eyed seeing of devils behind every sorrow. But I am saying that a system which has ruled the category out entirely cannot be the foundation a Christian builds his soul-care upon. The believer knows there is a war on. The secular psychologist has been trained to insist there is no such thing. They cannot both be right, and the Christian who has forgotten which one to believe has forgotten something at the very center of his faith.

chapter eight

one truth, two realities

Now we come down to the bedrock, to the deepest lie underneath the whole therapeutic structure, the one that holds all the rest of it up. And it is worth going slowly here, because this is a genuinely philosophical thing, and getting it right will steady you in a hundred other arguments besides this one. It is the matter of truth, and reality, and perception, and the modern confusion of the three.

Let me start with the single stupidest question in all of philosophy, the one you have heard a hundred times: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? People ask it as though it were deep. It is not deep. It is a confusion, and a small one. Of course the tree makes a sound. When it falls it sends waves pulsing out through the air, whether or not there is an ear anywhere near to catch them, and those waves travel and spread and gradually fade with distance exactly as the laws of physics say they must, and the presence or absence of a listener changes precisely nothing about any of it. The sound waves do not politely wait to see if anyone is watching. Reality does not depend on an observer. The tree fell, and the air moved, and it made no difference at all that no human ear was there. That is simply how the world is.

Reality does not wait to see if anyone is watching. The tree fell, and the air moved, and no ear was needed to make it so.

Why does that silly little question matter to us here? Because it contains, in miniature, the exact error that the whole therapeutic and relativist age is built upon: the collapsing of reality into perception, the belief that a thing is only real, or only true, insofar as it is experienced by someone. And this is where we must be careful and precise, because two different words are getting tangled, and untangling them is the whole battle. There is truth, and there is reality, and they are not quite the same, and the modern age has made a ruin of both by confusing them.¹⁵

Here is the clean distinction, and I want you to hold it firmly. Truth is one, and it is objective, and it never changes, and it never bends to a single human opinion, because truth is grounded in God, who is what He is whether anyone believes it or not. That is fixed. There is no such thing as your truth and my truth, not really; there is the truth, God’s, one and the same for every soul that has ever lived, and our feelings and our experiences do not get a vote on it. But the word reality is trickier, because it does double duty. There is the one true reality, the way things actually are, objective and single and God’s; and there is reality in the smaller, looser sense of the way a given person perceives and experiences the world, which is limited, and partial, and colored by everything they do and do not know. And the great lie of our age is to take that second thing, my perceived reality, and to crown it as though it were the first.

For our perception is genuinely limited, and a Christian of all people should be the first to admit it. I do not see the whole of anything. My knowledge is partial, my vantage is narrow, my heart is deceitful and colors what I see, and there is vastly more that I do not know than that I do. Two people can stand at the same event and carry away honestly different impressions of it, not because there are two realities, but because each of them saw a sliver of the one reality through the narrow and smudged window of a finite and fallen mind. The Scripture says this exactly, and beautifully: that now we see through a glass, darkly. We do see; it is not that nothing can be known. But we see dimly, in part, as in a poor and clouded mirror, and the day is coming when we shall see face to face and know even as we are known.¹⁶

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

– 1 Corinthians 13:12

Do you see how this quietly demolishes the whole my-truth religion? When a person says my truth, they have taken the narrow, partial, smudged little window of their own perception and mistaken it for reality itself. They have confused how fully they see with what is actually there. And the therapeutic culture feeds this at every turn: it enthrones personal experience as the highest authority, it teaches you that your feelings are a kind of infallible testimony, it tells you to live your truth and trust your heart, precisely the heart the Scripture calls deceitful above all things. But your feelings are not truth. They are your perception, weather moving across the surface of a mind that sees, at best, through a darkened glass. The truth stands outside you, fixed, in God, and the whole task of a life is not to declare your truth but to bring your dim and partial seeing ever more into line with the one reality that was there all along.

And this is the thing the unbeliever cannot finally hold, and the believer can. For if there is no God, then there is no fixed point, no single reality standing over all our perceptions to judge them, and my-truth-and-your-truth is, in fact, all you are left with, a war of perceptions with no referee. It is only because there is a God, who is Himself the truth, who sees all things exhaustively and as they actually are, that there is one reality at all for our many perceptions to be measured against. The Christian is the only one with real ground to stand on here. Pilate, standing in front of the incarnate Truth Himself, sneered the age’s question, what is truth, and turned away without waiting for the answer, never grasping that the answer was standing bound before him, looking him in the eye. That is the modern soul exactly: asking what is truth while turning its back on the only One who is the answer.¹⁷

chapter nine

handling babylon’s goods

So what do we do with all of it? Having said this much, and this hard, I owe you a plain and careful answer, and it is not the answer of the fanatic who would have you burn every psychology book and fear every doctor. It is the answer, I think, of Daniel.

For remember how Daniel lived. He was carried off into Babylon, into the very court of the pagan king, and he was taught the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans, and he used it, and rose by it, and served faithfully within it. He did not refuse to learn what Babylon knew. But he never for one moment bowed to Babylon’s gods, never ate the king’s defiling food, never forgot for a heartbeat whose he was and which kingdom was true. He handled Babylon’s goods with open eyes and an undivided heart, using what could be used, refusing what could not, and always, always, keeping the Lord his God as his final authority. That is the posture. That is how a stranger lives in Babylon.

Use what can be used. Bow to none of it. And keep the Word of God as your final authority, always.

So I will tell you the truth about where I land, and I will not pretend it is simpler than it is. There are things in the field of psychology that are real observations, common grace scattered even there, true things about how memory works, or how fear operates in the body, or how grief moves in stages, and a discerning believer may use such things, as I have myself, the way Daniel used the learning of Babylon. But, and this is everything, you must know what you are handling. You must understand that the foundation of the system is not neutral, that its roots run down into a pagan soil, that its account of what you are and what will save you is a rival gospel, and you must therefore tread into it slowly, carefully, and armed, going to the Word first and letting the Word rule, testing everything, keeping what agrees with Scripture and throwing back without apology everything that does not. Use it as an exile uses the tools of his captors, never as a disciple sits at the feet of his master.¹⁸

But the deepest word I can leave you with is not about what to reject; it is about what we already have, and have too often despised. We were handed the Wonderful Counselor Himself, the One in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, who knows what is in a man because He made him, and who has given us His sufficient Word and His indwelling Spirit and His people to bring that Word to bear on one another in love. The church went looking in Babylon for a wisdom it already possessed, and left the wellspring to dig at broken cisterns. We do not need to. The living water is ours. So take your troubled soul, and your real griefs, and your genuine wounds, not first to the couch, but to the Word, and to the Lord of the Word, and to the wise and godly people who love you, and you will find, I promise you, that the old paths are not only truer than Babylon’s, but kinder, and deeper, and able to heal in a way the couch never could.