A Guide to Reading David Powlison – Shane Becker

This article offers a guide to some of David Powlison’s most significant resources. To find the full list of his books, articles, messages, and more, see the exhaustive bibliography of his publications.

At the time of his passing, David Powlison (1949–2019) was widely regarded as the leading voice of the biblical counseling movement. For nearly four decades, he produced seminal works in pastoral theology and profoundly edifying resources for counseling.

He labored to reclaim the heartland of counseling — “where motive, desire, behavior, and worship live” — from worldly presuppositions.1 He penned fresh, case-wise theology and advanced penetrating critiques of “contemporary sources of confusion and darkness.”2 Yet like Christ his Lord, Powlison brought complexities down to “street-level strugglers.”3 He believed in the common touch — and by the grace of God, he had it.

In his final public address, Powlison declared, “My deepest hope for you is that in both your personal life and your ministry to others, you would be unafraid to be publicly weak as the doorway to the strength of God himself.”4 He knew that true change happens when “truth meets truth,” when the Redeemer meets us in our honest weakness.5

Since Powlison was committed to restoring Christ to counseling and counseling to the church, here is a guided tour of 22 resources that trace the main contours of his writings.6

The Historian

It may surprise you to learn that David Powlison was not only a counselor but also a trained historian. In both roles, he lived by the same conviction: “Listen carefully to people and to all that’s going on; then seek to make sense of it all!”7 So, it is fitting that our reading strategy begins by plunging into history first.

1. The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context (1996; 2010)

Consider our historical moment. There was a time when pop psychology had not yet flooded the pulpit and the pew. The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) had not been penned, and modern psychology did not yet claim to compete with biblical categories in the popular Christian mind. This has changed.

If history like this intrigues you, there is no better place to begin reading Powlison than with his dissertation. Before you skip it, know that it’s not a traditional dissertation — the kind often used as a cure for sleepless nights. No, this is a self-critical, attentive, and fair-minded history of modern Protestant soul-care. It remains the definitive work on the origins of the biblical counseling movement from the 1960s to the 1990s. Powlison retells the conflict between Jay Adams and a rapidly professionalizing community of Christian psychotherapists.

2. “Integration or Inundation?” in Power Religion: The Selling Out of the Evangelical Church? (1992)

For those preferring a shorter read, this chapter serves as a mini-dissertation. Powlison traces the influence of psychology on mainstream evangelicalism, highlighting three stages.

The 1950s–60s sparked new interest as Christians turned to psychology for help. Clyde Narramore’s trichotomous model distinguished pastoral, psychological, and medical roles, sanctioning Christian training in psychology at new institutions such as Fuller Seminary. This era culminated in Jay Adams’s 1970 critique, Competent to Counsel, igniting sharp debate.

Integrationists responded to Adams in the 1970s–80s. They founded journals, private practices, referral networks, and more schools. Acknowledging the weaknesses of their predecessors, they integrated the Bible with psychology more thoughtfully, despite Adams’s objections to their underlying epistemology and ecclesiology. Christian psychotherapy became a legitimized profession.

From the mid-1980s onward, psychology gained social and cultural authority, filling evangelical culture with new terms and categories that shaped everyday discourse. Much of evangelicalism was baptized in pop psychology. Terms such as self-esteem, dysfunctional family, codependency, unconditional love, felt needs, and victimization became common.8

3. “25 Years of Biblical Counseling: An Interview with Jay Adams and John Bettler” (2018)

If you want an insider’s perspective on the pioneers of the biblical counseling movement, Jay Adams and John Bettler, don’t miss this 1993 interview moderated by Powlison. They discuss the founding of CCEF, clarify common misconceptions about Adams’s views, explore Cornelius Van Til’s apologetic methodology, and debate the best word to describe the relationship between Christianity and secular psychology.

4. “Answers for the Human Condition: Why I Chose Seminary for Training in Counseling” (2001)

Here, Powlison explains why he chose Westminster Theological Seminary for training. He offers nine key questions for anyone considering graduate study, emphasizing that “biblical wisdom is the simple that probes and comprehends the complex, not the simplistic that ignores the complex.”9

The Thought Leader

In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis argues that great writing invites reflective reading and beckons rereading.10 Powlison’s work embodies this standard. Read him long enough, and you see his perpetual effort to refine biblical counseling. He pursued what he described as a “comprehensive and case-wise pastoral theology, something worthy of the name systematic biblical counseling.”11 Powlison didn’t merely record the biblical counseling movement; he helped shape it. The following resources highlight his key contributions.

5. “Affirmations & Denials: A Proposed Definition of Biblical Counseling” (2000)

What is biblical counseling? What is it not? This article dives beneath the caricatures and misrepresentations, and explains how “God’s view of counseling cuts deeper, applies wider, aims different, lasts longer, matters more” than “everything else available in the bazaar of options, of other counsels, other schemas, other practices, other systems.”12

6. “The Sufficiency of Scripture to Diagnose and Cure Souls” (2005)

In this editorial, Powlison expounds on the phrase “lusts of the flesh” and why it is important for understanding our problems. He probes the intricacies of our desires through fifteen questions, declaring, “Naming is not the same as understanding what your wants mean and how you should evaluate them.”13

7. “Idols of the Heart and ‘Vanity Fair’” (1991)

Where Jay Adams emphasized personal agency for sin, David plumbed deeper into motivation, describing how behavior is downstream from worship. He “explores one weighty question: How is sin more than behavior?”14 Praising this work, Tim Keller noted how “seminal” it was for his own thinking on idolatry.15 For a companion piece, see “Revisiting Idols of the Heart and Vanity Fair” (2013).

8. “Crucial Issues in Contemporary Biblical Counseling” (1988)

Where does biblical counseling need growth? Powlison highlighted six issues that warrant crucial development. He noted, “Every section of this paper demands at the very least a definitive book or two.”16

9. “How Does Scripture Teach Us to Redeem Psychology?” (2012)

How does biblical Christianity relate to psychology? Is it a relationship of antagonism? Utter rejection? Unreserved embrace? See Powlison avoid both extremes of “psycho-bashing” and “psycho-heresy.”

10. “Biological Psychiatry” (1999)

What about issues of biology? What about the mind-body relation? In this article, Powlison “updates what ‘truly organic’ problems are in light of developments in psychiatry after Jay Adams wrote his views.”17

The Apologist

Have you ever thought of David Powlison as an apologist? He once argued, “The overarching metaphor for our task is the counselor-as-missionary to psychology rather than counselor-as-integrator of psychology.”18 Powlison rejected the idea of religious neutrality. “Where the God-ward referent is not specifically comprehended,” he warned, “a particular psychological theory or counseling system is a distortion of the facts.”19

For him, counseling, like apologetics, brought a clash of worldviews. He did not reject the Reformed category of common grace, but he remained sharply discerning regarding the omni-relevance of presuppositions.

11. “Cure of Souls (and the Modern Psychotherapies)” (2007)

This is Powlison at his best — he covers issues related to licensure, education, epistemological priorities, and more. It is a tour de force. Before you read any of the following, read “Cure of Souls” first.

12. “Which Presuppositions? Secular Psychology and the Categories of Biblical Thought” (1984)

This is Powlison’s first written publication, and it showcases a key influence. In a 2011 interview, Powlison remarked that “from a deep structure standpoint, biblical counseling is Van Tillian utterly, from beginning to end.”20 This piece traces the necessary consequences of Cornelius Van Til’s apologetic methodology for counseling.

13. “Critiquing Modern Integrationists” (1993)

For those wondering what “integrationism” is or why it is at odds with biblical counseling, see its development and why he critiques it here.

14. “A Biblical Counseling View” & “Responses” in Psychology & Christianity: Five Views (2009)

On two separate occasions, Powlison engaged in formal debate through the written word. Witness him wield his apologetic methodology in action with four other views.

For more resources like these, see:

“Modern Therapies and the Church’s Faith” (1996)
“Giving Reasoned Answers to Reasonable Questions” (2014)
“Vive la Différence!” (2014)

The Professor

Did you know that David Powlison was a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary from 1980 to 2019? He regularly taught “Dynamics of Biblical Change” and “Theology and Secular Psychology.” If you include workshops and intensives, he taught “Dynamics” over two hundred times. Here’s a paragraph from that syllabus:

This is a course about people. It is about how people change into the “image-in-action” of Jesus Christ. (The words “image,” “likeness,” and “character” tend to sound static — like a snapshot or icon rather than live stage production or streaming video. The image of Jesus moves, feels, thinks, decides, talks, acts, and reacts.) I intend our course to be practical theology. Not abstraction. We’ll get onto the street and into the heart (where people live, where the Bible lives, where Jesus lived and continues to live, where you live).21

If you want to “get onto the street and into the heart” with Powlison, explore the following resources.

15. The Pastor as Counselor: The Call for Soul Care (2021)

Everyone counsels. “‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ calls you to counsel.”22 Yet a pastor’s call to counsel is distinct from other vocations. Read why he argues, “Pastors must not hand over care and cure of souls to other voices.”23

16. “X-Ray Questions: Drawing Out the Whys and Wherefores of Human Behaviors” (1999)

It is no overstatement to say that we cannot understand people well if we do not ask the right questions. Here is a list of 35 questions that capture the why of what makes people tick.

17. “Is the Adonis Complex in Your Bible?” (2004)

How do you make biblical sense of contemporary struggles that the Bible never explicitly names? This article addresses that question. Powlison admonishes, “Ministry of the word of God doesn’t talk in boilerplate. Living truth is always adorned with the particulars of person and situation. Wisdom is never paint by numbers.”24

18. “Familial Counseling: The Paradigm for Counselor-Counselee Relationships in 1 Thessalonians 5” (2007)

Counselees are made in the image of God. They are not “cases,” nor are they mere “clients.” In this article, Powlison draws from 1 Thessalonians 5 to ground the “counselor-counselee” relationship in a familial paradigm. For a teaser, he writes, “Sometimes with the weak, the greatest sanctification occurs in those who show care, because the sufferers of weakness don’t and can’t change much. This is part of why our vision for ‘sanctification’ must be corporate, and not only individual.”25

For more resources like these, see:

“Counsel Ephesians” (1999)
“How Do You Help a ‘Psychologized’ Counselee?” (1996)
“Does the Shoe Fit?” (2002)
“Love Speaks Many Languages Fluently” (2002)
“The Ambiguously Cured Soul” (2001)
“Ten Questions to Ask Before Starting a Counseling Ministry in Your Church” (2015)
“Innocent Pleasures” (2005)
“‘I’ll Never Get Over It’ — Help for the Aggrieved” (2014)

The Counselor

When trouble comes to your door, or rises out of your own heart, where do you turn? Whose voice do you listen to? Powlison was preoccupied with these kinds of questions because they probed the “active verb of the human heart” and captured “the echoes of a lost paradise.”26 He was wholly aware that Christ meets us in the context of life’s grittiness.

As we’re surrounded by ten thousand false voices, he was concerned with amplifying One to showcase the wonders that only the Wonderful Counselor can offer. He believed “God’s voice speaks deeper than what hurts, brighter than what is dark, more enduring than what is lost, truer than what has happened.”27 Here are several resources to help you in your struggle with sin and suffering.

19. Making All Things New: Restoring Joy to the Sexually Broken (2017)

This is one of the best books on sexuality that exists. It is written for both the immoral and the victimized. Powlison reminds us, “To the indulgent, he brings forgiveness, covering perverse pleasures with new innocence. To the frightened, he brings refuge, the name that calms our fears and bids our sorrows cease. There is pleasure and protection in Christ, God’s inexpressible gift.”28

20. “Suffering and Psalm 119” (2004)

Christians are called to live a “psalmic faith.” The psalms, like Psalm 119, breathe fresh air into our lungs. They help us speak with godly honesty as we live before God’s face in a dark and broken world. As Powlison writes, “Psalm 119 is not information about the Bible; it’s speech therapy for the inarticulate.”29

21. “‘Peace, Be Still’: Learning Psalm 131 by Heart” (2000)

You may be familiar with Powlison’s “Anti-Psalms.” He wrote one for Psalm 23 and did again here for Psalm 131. These inverted psalms capture the brokenness of life and the false voices that beckon for our attention. See why Powlison turned to Psalm 131 to find quiet when life got loud.

22. “What Do You Feel?” (1992)

The phrase “I feel . . .” has become quite a common expression. Yet what’s beneath the language? Powlison argues, “The same word is often used to communicate four very different things: experience, emotions, thinking, and desires!” This article “penetrates the smokescreen” and explores how the Bible reckons with all the ways we feel.

For more resources like these, see:

Good and Angry: Redeeming Anger, Irritation, Complaining, and Bitterness (2016)

God’s Grace in Your Suffering (2018)
“What Is Your Calling?” (2014)
“The God of All Comfort” (2017)
“Speaking of Brokenness” (2018)
“Don’t Worry” (2003)

A Thousand Augustines

The biblical counseling movement celebrated its 55th anniversary last year since Jay Adams’s publication Competent to Counsel. Still relatively young, it is no secret that the movement is in need of development. In multiple places, over eight times, Powlison declared, “We have work to do.”30 He was no triumphalist; he was keenly sympathetic to the critiques of his opponents. He called for further development in many areas: to better define the relationship between human responsibility and human suffering, to more deeply probe the biblical data about the counselor-counselee relationship, to freshly contextualize biblical counseling to new audiences, and to again “state, and illustrate concretely, the riches of our position towards secular psychology,” to name a few.31

Yet in response to Robert C. Roberts on how the biblical counseling movement will advance, he wrote that it will not likely come by the leadership of one grand Augustinian figure. Biblical counseling is for “garden-variety” people, for you and for me; therefore, the way the church will advance is by answering the Lord’s call to counsel biblically together. He wrote,

Roberts may be right that no solitary and extraordinary genius will arise among us. Perhaps since care and counseling are fundamentally tasks of corporate wisdom, our Lord will be pleased to raise up something better, a corporate Augustine, a hundred Augustines, a hundred thousand Augustines, for the task that faces us. Perhaps many Christians will tackle the same massive intellectual and practical project: to construct “systematic biblical counseling” for the beginning of the third millennium anno Domini. After all, the Bible offers unique and superior wisdom, not only for extraordinary people, but also for ordinary people (see Ps. 119:98–100; 1 Cor. 1–2). Our problem is not so much a matter of talent, but a matter of corporate vision and will.32

The call of the hour, then, is to reaffirm our priorities as we build on the church’s past while not ignoring the demands of the present. When we rightly believe in the sufficiency of Scripture, we will find plentiful resources in Christ’s storehouse of counsel to help saints, sinners, and sufferers “as wide as human diversity and as deep as human complexity.”33

Will you answer the call?

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