Cornelius Van Til may not have intended to launch the biblical counseling movement, but his Bible-saturated presuppositional approach to philosophy and science infused its breath. What exactly did presuppositional apologetics contribute to biblical counseling? Van Til’s thought brought biblical counseling to life, and can maintain and restore it.
Biblical Counseling’s Presuppositional Birth
Biblical counseling grew to maturity in the scholarly community that clung—and clings—to the sole authority of Scripture, against the modernist and liberal authority of autonomous science and philosophy, an authority derived from so-called “brute facts.” Their authority cannot be integrated with that of Scripture, because the Bible proclaims them antithetical to its foundations. Romans 8:7 states, “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile [antithetical] to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” This community, Westminster Theological Seminary, is alma mater or friend to most readers, who are well acquainted with her headline apologist, Van Til, who propounded this antithesis with single-eyed clarity: “Apologetics is the vindication of the Christian philosophy of life against the various forms of the non-Christian philosophy of life.” He taught that these opposing philosophies stem from different attitudes toward God—love or hatred of him—and that these attitudes either purify or pollute all human thought, volition, behavior, study, even our merest glance. Where differing orientations toward God meet, at their point of contact, they join in dynamic conversation— evangelism, apologetics, and biblical counseling.
Biblical counseling pioneers at what became the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation— Adams, Bettler, Welch, Tedd and Paul Tripp, and Powlison—arose breathing this air of antithesis and point of contact under Van Til’s influence. Following his reasoning, they inhaled the Scripture’s scintillating, hopeful insight that each person’s behavior arises from his inner predisposition toward God, con or pro—Van Til’s antithesis. Their insights—written, taught, and trained—raised the banner of biblical authority and sufficiency for the care of souls from the half-staff to which modern psychologies had lowered it, to full-staff, and launched the biblical counseling movement. The heart, the inner man, leapt out as man’s presuppositional basis.
Private Talks Show Public Need
During our student days (my wife Sharon and I studied together at WTS in the mid-1990s), three conversations suggested how deeply the coherency of biblical counseling with presuppositional apologetics had penetrated the Westminster curriculum. Taken together, these highlight the importance of Van Til’s key insights to biblical counseling.
As we were finding our seats in the Van Til auditorium for “The Dynamics of Biblical Change” (David Powlison’s introductory course in biblical counseling), we heard one classmate observe aloud, “This is Van Til applied!” Since we were also taking our introductory apologetics class, his connection seemed natural, even fundamental. Our presuppositions determine our conclusions; our loves and fears determine our actions. Since God alone can change our presuppositions, we who studied counseling and apologetics found it natural that God alone can change our loves and fears, our worship. As course followed course, these two principles merged into a single dynamic, exciting reverence for God’s power through the Bible to exchange our God-suppressing presuppositions and beliefs for the fear of God.
All brute facts or ideas have, standing behind them, a shadowy rival to God’s authority.
Sharon, an MAR Biblical Counseling major, recalls this advice from a fellow student who was finishing his final MDiv year: “If you want to understand Van Tilian presuppositionalism, take Powlison’s class, ‘Theology and Secular Psychology.’” She took the class, and understood Van Til more deeply. I enrolled the next year.
As my residential studies at WTS were wrapping up, a professor friend asked me about my ThM thesis. I replied that I was developing a biblical argument for a pre-affectional approach to aesthetics, standing triadically with the better-known presuppositional approach to noetics and a predispositional approach to ethics. He observed, “You Van Til types focus on antithesis, but I’m more in the common grace camp.” I gulped. My studies in aesthetics had made me closely acquainted with common grace, so his suggestion that antithesis and common grace stood against each other startled me. Was there no coordinating them? What does Scripture teach? My ears went up. The Scripture had already provided a working model for common grace in aesthetics that took full account of antithesis, probably because I had also been reading Van Til. As I reflected on my friend’s remark, this simple working model seemed more urgently worth developing.
As I went on to practice and teach biblical counseling, and to write a biblical doctrine of aesthetics (now published as A Redemptive Theology of Art), the risk of brute values in these coordinated fields remained firmly in view.
No Brute Facts!
Van Til maintained that every fact or predication finds its meaning only within a system of thought shaped by one’s predisposition toward God, for or against him. This basic predisposition, this presupposition, starts as an attitude toward God, fleshed out as implications about his character and purpose. Such presuppositions usually remain tacit, present but unconsidered. These false beliefs contradict what God says about himself.
In our fallen condition, we find contradictory doctrines of God attractive. Our false views of God seem obvious when we consider the details of our situation, severed from their context in God. Thus, they seem to be brute facts, with an authority all their own. Van Til warned his students, “No brute facts.” All facts find their meaning in the fear of the Lord. By presupposing that God is bad or nonexistent, people suppress his truth by imagining that his facts have authoritative meaning without him, that is, such facts are “brute.” Thus, the line between good and evil runs directly through each heart. Threats to biblical counseling through misconception of these areas arise first from every biblical counselor’s own heart. Biblical counselors’ and teachers’ misdirected approaches appear most readily as we set them beside Van Til’s signature insights.
Brute values of every kind threaten all Christian undertakings, including biblical counseling. A counselor can value his mission for its own sake rather than for God’s sake, altering that mission. This alteration attributes a “brute” character to that aspect, suppressing the antithesis between two mutually exclusive postures toward God. To elevate some word, category, concept or outcome for its own sake alone, as if it were spiritually inert, creates the delusion that neither love for God nor resistance to him makes any difference. “Brute” describes anything that holds the same value to the unbelieving mind as to the believing mind. By designating a treasured object as neutral, we make it “brute.” All brute facts or ideas have, standing behind them, a shadowy rival to God’s authority.
Van Til’s presuppositional approach at work sets a hopeful course correction to restore biblical counseling, where it strays, to its biblical distinctives and its roots. Three representative issues in biblical counseling— suffering, desire, and common grace—demonstrate a threat to its integrity when they “break brute.”
Suffering
The Westminster Shorter Catechism states, “The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery.” God cursed his creation because of Adam’s sin, bringing suffering to him and to all his descendants. God has various intentions for this suffering. These contrasting purposes, beginning with punishment for some and discipline for others, all unite in glorifying God.
People respond to suffering variously, each according to his stance toward God. Peter urges suffering believers to suffer faithfully and fruitfully, not faithlessly. We suffer faithlessly by assuming God does not purpose in our suffering his glory, and our discipline and maturing. Such purposeless suffering qualifies as brute, since it has the same meaning for the believing heart as for the unbelieving one—at best, nothing; at worst, God’s malice. We all know something of temptation to fruitless, faithless suffering. Here are some things that “brute suffering” does.
1. Brute suffering tempts us to be “surprised at the fiery trial” (1 Peter 4:12), seeking comfort in blaming God as unfair or absent, and in self-exalting isolation: “I suffer alone.” “The world has it in for me.” “No one has suffered like I have, so no one can understand me, comfort me, or advise me.”
2. Brute suffering tempts us to assume that our suffering gives us unique authority, often using the name, “lived experience.” The unassailable authority of my own experience of hardship and victimhood validates my interpretation of it. We can appeal to our lived experience to prove the justice of our complaints against our persecutors and our moral superiority to them.
3. Brute suffering is blind to our sin against God. When someone wrongs us, we take the lead role as sufferer-in-chief. Used corporately—“We are victims”—this God-ignoring approach finds modern articulation in the familiar social construct of oppressed vs. oppressors, usurping God’s centrality as the oppressor’s target, as his judge, and as the liberator of the oppressed.
4. Brute suffering may induce me to conclude that my suffering must be my own fault: “God is paying me back for something I did.”
5. Brute suffering can tempt us to deny God’s word that he is strong and good, by pretending that God is too weak, too distant, or too harsh to prevent our suffering.
On the counselor’s side, the sufferings of others may stir us to prioritize relieving suffering, usurping God’s compassion toward the sons he disciplines and his purposes to sanctify and relieve them. Such a focus can make attractive to counselors those techniques and practices that have demonstrated effectiveness for sufferers, irrespective of a person’s posture toward suffering, whether they suffer faithfully or see their suffering as brute and undifferentiated.
While all suffer, Scripture distinguishes two sorts of suffering: punishment and discipline. Since all appear to suffer similarly, and God’s various purposes remain hidden in his secret counsel, our examination might better consider two attitudes toward suffering, faithful and faithless. The faithless heart is surprised at suffering, and so can respond with indignation, blaming, despair, and isolation. Scripture resounds with warnings to believers to avoid the faithless attitude. The faithful heart in suffering submits himself to God, discerns his participation in the sufferings of Christ, and cries out to God for relief.
A brief review of God’s purposes in suffering will clear the air and our minds. God brings suffering to his people:
• According to his will (1 Peter 4:19)
• As discipline reserved exclusively for his sons, for our good, that we may share his holiness and that we may see him (Heb. 12:5–10, 14)
• To produce the fruit of righteousness (Heb. 12:11)
• To produce endurance, character, hope, and vindication in God’s love through the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:3–5)
• To fill up “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body” (Col. 1:24)
• To share with others the comfort we have received in Christ (2 Cor. 1:4–7)
• To reveal Christ’s life in us (2 Cor. 4:10)
• To prepare for us future glory so great that it vastly outweighs our present suffering (2 Cor. 4:14–18)
All believers’ sufferings will be relieved! Some can be alleviated in this life, but full comfort waits for the life to come. For now, as Jesus healed the sick and blind, the biblical counselor can pray and work to relieve the suffering, to strengthen weak knees (see Heb. 12:12–13). But when biblical counselors set relieving suffering over God’s fatherly purposes for his children’s suffering, they ignore the antithesis between faithful and faithless suffering that Van Til pioneered, rendering suffering brute.
All believers, even those whose suffering we can help relieve, need training, encouragement, and fellowship to suffer faithfully. They should not suffer in isolation from Christ, nor should their suffering define their identity. For this, we must see and show Christ’s powerful grace that answers our sin of isolating in our suffering, so we may faithfully pursue God’s purposes in it. All believing sufferers—whether from illness, mental disorders, injuries, abuse, hostility, fraud or imprisonment—can look to Christ as the first sufferer, so we can turn from isolation and suffer with him. Guided by Scripture, we can look to God’s promised purposes in suffering—it produces endurance, character, and hope that does not disappoint (Rom. 5:3–5); our light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (2 Cor. 4:17). Believing sufferers can see Christ in Scripture, sufficient to change our solitary suffering to suffering in solidarity with him.
Desire
Our desires masquerade as imperial, immutable impulses, even as requirements or needs. We experience them as if they happen to us without our will. Sin-sick Israel gave in to their desire as if they were powerless. Jeremiah 2:25 states, “But you said, ‘It is hopeless, for I have loved foreigners, and after them I will go.’” And Jeremiah 5:30–31 says, “An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction; my people love to have it so….” The sinful actions are deplorable; the inner affection is abominable.
Sexual desires are paraded in our days as brute desires, and any discussion of changing them is worse than impossible; the very thought of change is repellant as if the very brute-ness of sexual desire is itself to be desired. Our brute desires justify us and blame God: “God made me this way.” Desires once acknowledged as perverse are now alleged to be God’s good gift, conferring a preferred identity and demanding affirmation.
Modern rhetoric about desires and affections, even among Christians, frequently overlooks God’s desire and considers only human desires. Casting our desire as immutable and active, with ourselves passive, suppresses the voluntary aspect of our desires, the suffering they entail, and God’s redemptive purposes. Such desires are brute, without reference to God.
As the Bible teaches two ways of suffering, so also it teaches two trajectories of desire, as Galatians 5:17 says, “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other…” We learn from Proverbs 13 that desire’s opposite, revulsion, reveals with equal clarity which pattern we are following: “A desire fulfilled is sweet to the soul, but to turn away from evil is an abomination to fools” (Prov. 13:19). Everyone desires either God-honoring wisdom or self-honoring folly. No desires are brute.
The antithesis between the desires of the flesh and the desires of the Spirit, seen through the Fall and embedded in redemptive history, appears as a dynamic tension with a sure conclusion coming. This battle displays God’s desire and power to break the stranglehold of brute desire from his people, that we may desire him. To sanctify his sheep who still incline to unholy desires, God promises and delivers rich compassion—his own presence. He gives us a heart of flesh in place of our heart of stone, so that we may say with the psalmist, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you” (Ps. 73:25). Our compassionate God calls biblical counselors to comfort and help our counselees in discipling the whole person, including their desires, revulsions and other affections, together with their mind and will.
Common Grace
Common grace, a latecomer to systematic theology, came to articulation through Abraham Kuyper. He envisioned this doctrine as Christians’ warrant to take part in the common life and culture that surrounded them, resisting the Anabaptists’ insistence on separation from it. He could attribute to God all good things that come to humankind without distinction.
The doctrine of common grace is largely understood, even in the Reformed circles, as blessing all people alike, and having no further purpose. This misconstruction renders it vulnerable to breaking brute, establishing an authority outside the Scripture that believers are obliged to respect.
Biblical counselors can discover this vulnerability when we make outcomes—change the situation, relieve the suffering, escape addiction—our final goal. Where proven methods for relieving people’s suffering emerge in secular counseling, those methods can then be urged on biblical counselors because “they come from God’s common grace”—the blessings that God gives to all without distinction. We have no need to consider antithesis, because “this effective technique comes from God.” If it brings the desired relief, it must be because of God’s common grace. Equipped with these techniques, the biblical counselor can pursue measurable positive outcomes in the name of God’s compassion. This pursuit as a guide to the care of souls ignores the purpose of our own salvation, which is to seek God’s glory.
Kuyper’s doctrine of common grace caught on with later scholars, who re-articulated it with increasing abstraction from Kuyper’s concept:
• “There are no two kinds of grace in God, but only one,” writes Louis Berkhof, meaning to unify God’s common grace with his saving grace, differing only in degree, resulting in “different gifts and operations.”
• Charles Hodge distinguishes common grace from saving grace as “operations… of an entirely different kind.”
• By the early twenty-first century, Wayne Grudem could write bluntly, “common grace does not save people.”
• John Frame prefers to speak of such common graces as “common goodness or common love,” and not as grace at all, thus finalizing common grace’s distinction from saving grace.
A common grace so conceived could touch all alike without distinguishing God’s elect from others. Whatever the purpose and effect of common grace blessings, they would have the same effect on the elect as on the unregenerate, and this would be according to God’s own sovereign will. By this means, common grace became brute grace, incapable of advancing God’s glory in redemption. But it would acquire a special authority all on its own, outside of God’s word. This authority could give warrant for biblical counselors to incorporate secular premises and methods. It amplifies the freedom of the counselees’ will to seize on God’s general benevolence, or not, as they wished, free of the imperatives that directly follow from the indicative of God’s electing, saving grace.
Such common “grace” would diverge from, as Ephesians 1 says, “the mystery of God’s will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him….” Such common grace could be applauded as God’s general benevolence to all, closely resembling the universal potential atonement argued by Semi-Pelagians and Arminians—autotelic, and therefore powerless to actually save. Where saving grace is restored, such common brute grace is revealed as unbiblical and unsuitable for the biblical counselor. Common grace, seen biblically, is most fitting for God’s purposes, unfolding in his time. Here again, Van Til points the way.
Secularists and liberals argued, in Van Til’s day, that scientific facts lie outside of any religion or philosophy of life, and are not conditioned by them; but rather have inherent authority of their own, authority over any other philosophy, especially the Christian philosophy of life. We see the same in our day, exemplified in yard signs proclaiming, “We believe… Science is science.” The contagion of extra-biblical authority has spread to the soft sciences and is smuggled into biblical counseling under the aegis of a misconstructed common grace. Van Til saw the danger and framed a biblical view of common grace that accords with antithesis. Though not unfamiliar with common grace in its broader usage, Van Til did not separate it from saving grace: “Common grace is subservient to special or saving grace. As such it helps to bring out the very contrast between this saving grace and the curse of God.” While this helps us, what doctrine of common grace does the Bible teach that serves in biblical counseling?
Soul change comes from God through a change of heart, a change of our worship, a change of our foundational presuppositions.
Jesus teaches a clearer, more consistent, and helpful model for common grace. Consider these two familiar teachings of common grace from Matthew 5:44–45: “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” God’s gifts of sunshine and rain and the passing of time are tokens of God’s common grace. Add to this the similar agricultural metaphor of this familiar parable:
The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?” He said to them, “An enemy has done this.” So the servants said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he said, “No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, ‘Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’” (Matt. 13:24–30)
Again, in this parable, the soil, the sun, and the patient passage of time represent God’s common grace to wheat and weeds alike. Every passing day brings clearer development and distinction of the weeds and the wheat. These, God’s common graces, distinguish his people from others, to the praise of his glorious grace.
God’s common grace is powerful to draw his people to himself and distinguish them from others. Jesus’s parables themselves exemplify common grace; he addressed his parables to all who came to him. He closed many parables, and his letters to the churches, by commanding, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” His hearers might wonder, “Is he talking to me? Do I have ears to hear?” Among all who heard Jesus’s parables, only those to whom God gave ears could hear and obey his command, thus distinguishing them from all others. Nonhearers listened to his parables only to increase their guilt and advance their distinction, until the day God gives them ears or calls them to account. This purpose is the headwater of the right doctrine of God’s common grace.
God’s common grace always serves God’s purpose by incrementally advancing the distinction of his own people from others. It is always telic—accomplishing his objective—and never autotelic—an end in itself. One might even say that common grace is saving grace for the elect. Calvin affirms, “It is the Lord’s particular work to divide people into their respective ranks, distinguishing one from the other, as seems good to him, all men being on a level by nature.”
Counseling goals and methods that arise independent of the Scripture, independent of love of God and love of neighbor, and justified by appeal to brute common grace, fail, though they may bring immediate relief; they fail to strengthen the believer’s assurance as an incentive for hope, repentance, and faith; they fail to convict nonbelievers; they fail to glorify God. How can we think better? Let us remember and study biblical counseling’s origin in presuppositional apologetics. Biblical counseling at its best still retains the inner logic of presuppositional apologetics: our premises, arising from one of two antithetical attitudes toward God, determine our conclusions, our prayers, and our next steps toward bearing good fruit.
One Great Hope
My own myopic instinct to bring relief, instead of letting steadfastness under trial have its full effect (James 1:2–4), has already been paid for in Christ’s death. I can repent of panting after self-sufficiency and self-glory, and of berating myself for an unsatisfactory end to a counseling effort. Anything that the biblical counselor honors as brute, including suffering, desire, and common grace as it has been popularly conceived, once plunged beneath the cleansing flood, will display the profitability of Scripture to instruct, reprove, correct, and to train in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16–17).
Biblical Counseling Headwaters
In this brief consideration of an extensive subject, let it be enough for us here to hike to its headwaters, to its very watershed. Presuppositional apologetics shines a bright light that sets it apart from its classical and evidentialist cousins in the same way that biblical counseling is properly set apart from all forms of Christian integrationist counseling. Van Til made clear that arguments and evidences for God are secondary, not primary, for soul change. Soul change comes from God through a change of heart, a change of our worship, and a change of our foundational presuppositions. We were disposed against God before we acknowledged him—pre-indisposed! We appear before God guilty and condemned, not neutral, not capable of forming sound judgments of arguments or of evidences. We begin with our backs turned toward God. God reveals to his people their former antipathy so that they may excitedly love his mercy, turn toward him, honor Christ, and thank God for having paid for it in Christ’s death and resurrection. This bright air is the very oxygen that first filled the lungs of biblical counseling. God at work in this new heart changes everything.
God’s mercy has already reached our selfish presumptions: presumptions that our suffering is our own alone and gives us a superior authority; that our desires are our own, private and valid. Biblical clarity helps us see this and shows that God is already at work, graciously enabling and obliging counselee and counselor alike to repent. We counselors, together with our counselees, can and must throw ourselves on the rich mercy of God in Christ. We are already free from brute suffering, brute desire, and brute grace, together with the extra-biblical authority they imply.
Let us diligently preach the word to our own hearts. No finger-pointing will suffice to correct the slippage of biblical counseling into secular therapies. Let us look especially to Van Til’s two key insights—never brute facts, always antithesis—applied to ourselves and to those we love and serve. As there are no brute facts, so there is no brute biblical counseling. Adapting a phrase from Os Guinness, biblical counseling goes forward best when it goes back first. Van Til fathered biblical counseling, rightly describing and perhaps anticipating the practical working out of presuppositionalism in the care of souls. We lose sight of Van Til at the peril of losing biblical counseling.