Understanding People: Why We Long for Relationship

By Larry Crabb

"Every attempt to help people must first begin with an effort to understand people," says Dr. Larry Crabb. "And the only fully reliable source of information on that topic is the Bible."

In this Gold Medallion Award-winning classic, Dr. Crabb affirms the power of the Scriptures to address the intricacies and deep needs of the human heart. Exploring the inseparable link between spiritual and psychological realities, Understanding People offers a vital lens on how we're put together--who we really are and what makes us tick in our relationships with other people, with God, and with ourselves.

In three parts, this book first points us to the Bible as our source of insight into perplexing heart issues. Then it helps us come to grips with our brokenness as God's image-bearers, and it shows how we can reclaim our ability to reflect him in our growth toward maturity and healed relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9780310337027

Larry Crabb

Dr. Larry Crabb is a well-known psychologist, conference and seminary speaker, Bible teacher, popular author, and founder/director of NewWay Ministries. He is currently Scholar in Residence at Colorado Christian University in Denver and Visiting Professor of Spiritual Formation for Richmont Graduate University in Atlanta. Dr. Crabb and his wife of forty-six years, Rachael, live in the Denver, Colorado area. For additional information please visit www.newwayministries.org

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Preface

For some years now I have devoted considerable effort to thinking through the subject of biblical counseling. At least one conclusion seems clearly warranted: the ground to be covered includes an almost limitless assortment of thorny questions, each with the potential for creating division. And where the potential exists, the reality is not far behind.

Consider a few of the questions. First, what does it mean to claim that a particular approach to counseling is biblical? Certainly no evangelical would advertise that his or her ideas are unbiblical. Yet it seems that everyone who has taken a position on counseling has been criticized by someone else for being unbiblical. Christian counselors devote a good deal of their writing and lecturing to denouncing other Christian counselors as unbiblical in their views, or at least not as biblical as themselves.

Exactly how are we to measure whether a given counseling position qualifies to be called biblical? I recall one theologian suggesting that a training program in counseling would be biblical if it included a certain minimum of theology and English Bible courses. Behind his suggestion is the idea that counseling itself is abiblical, a discipline quite separate from biblical/theological matters, but that surrounding counseling theory with enough seminary-level courses would lift it to the status of biblical. All of us within theologically conservative circles want to be biblical, but what is it that makes one approach biblical (or more biblical) and another unbiblical (or less biblical)?

Reflect on a second set of perplexing questions. How are we to understand the relationship between biblical study and psychological inquiry? Is a degree in theology irrelevant to becoming a good biblical counselor — or is it essential? Or simply helpful? Should Christians aspiring toward the ministry of biblical counseling study secular psychology? Will it corrupt their thinking or expand it? Is it better to examine secular theory under the teaching of secular professors, or should secular theory only be critiqued with the help of Christian professors committed to biblical authority? Or perhaps, if the Bible really is sufficient to answer every question about counseling, secular theory should be ignored altogether. Over the years, I have routinely received letters asking whether I would recommend enrolling in a secular or a Christian school to study counseling. What answer should I give?

Is a thorough grounding in Scripture sufficient to equip someone as an effective counselor? Or is further practical training required, both in the application of the Bible and the method of application? What credentials or training or experience would you look for in deciding where to send your anorexic daughter or your depressed father for help?

Third, how should spiritual leaders in the church and trained counselors in their professional world work together to help people become emotionally whole and relationally effective? Mark McMinn, professor of psychology at George Fox University, continues to argue for a collaborative relationship between counselors and the church, where the resources of wisdom and availability are pooled to best help the most people. Under Tim Clinton, the American Association of Christian Counselors equips licensed counselors to do their work either through the church or in professional settings. Less focus is given to encouraging church leaders to form entire congregations into healing communities. Is spiritual maturity by itself sufficient to qualify someone to help others with problems such as sexual addiction, eating disorders, borderline personalities, and panic attacks? Is that the naive position held by Christian idealists and properly panned by thoughtful realists?

How about Larry Crabb? Does he really believe what his more recent books suggest, that soul talk can connect people into a true spiritual community that takes the pressure off people and releases gospel power into their lives? Can well-meaning Christians be equipped to have conversations that matter, conversations that can better achieve what we wrongly assume can only happen in therapy?

Fourth, what should we do with the tired but still live issue of self-esteem? Must we love ourselves before we can love others? Or is self-love nothing more than sinful self-obsession? Look beneath all the current thinking in Christian circles about how people change and you will see lined up on one side of a deep valley a large group who warmly exhort us to love ourselves as a necessary precondition for loving others. Love others as you love yourself is their key text, interpreted to teach that self-love must be developed before other-love is possible.¹ The core problem behind surface troubles is understood to be low self-acceptance, which, in some people’s minds, is really the essence of sin. Counseling efforts must therefore be directed toward helping people to accept themselves more completely.

There is another group who think that people are already too concerned with themselves and that efforts to build self-esteem aggravate the problem. The real problem is not unfulfilled longings, these folks claim, it is depravity. Sin has so blinded the hearts and minds of people that only truth from the Bible can bring the needed light. Study of God’s Word therefore is a priority.

Counselors of this persuasion are regarded by self-love advocates as harshly insensitive to deep human needs, so caught up in their cold, stiff, exegetical position that they miss the warm truth of God’s affirming love that throbs through the entire message of Scripture.

The Stiff Exegetes, huddled together across the valley from the Self-Lovers, suspect that self-worth is the enemy’s Trojan horse, a ploy designed to bring within the walls of the city of God a godless humanism dressed up in Christian-sounding language. Their chief concern seems to be that a human-centered distortion of the gospel is hiding within any teaching that gives place to a concern for self-worth. Accordingly, they strongly disclaim and oppose such teaching, believing that they are contending earnestly for the once-delivered faith. They tend to regard self-love advocates as a mixed multitude — some sincere believers who want to be biblical, others holding to frankly liberal or at least neoorthodox theology, but all deceived, wrong, and potentially dangerous.

I find myself in clear alignment with neither group. The Self-Lovers seem to reduce sin to something less heinous than arrogant rebellion and foolish self-sufficiency, and they therefore propose a remedy too mild to deal with the real problem. Providing conditions for growth is inappropriate treatment when a fast-growing malignancy is the problem.

The Stiff Exegetes, on the other hand, unwittingly allow a proper concern for precise interpretation of the Bible to rob the text of its relational and life-changing vitality. In order to maintain a nonrelational, impersonal understanding of the Bible, they must neglect many passages that underline the importance of community and intimacy. Their approach often produces people who excel more in scholarship and theological rigidity than in love, nondefensive living, and chosen holiness. They would insist that proper exegesis of the Word never separates doctrine from practice, that the Word — understood, proclaimed, and obeyed — is itself sufficient to change lives. But somehow God becomes separated from his Word, and time spent in the Word doesn’t quite get us to the Person who breathed the words we study.

The teaching of the Stiff Exegetes leaves large and significant areas of human experience untouched — and therefore unchanged. Vital truth that penetrates to the core issues of life has somehow been replaced with technical truth that equips people to pass seminary exams and to preach exegetically correct sermons but not to communicate deeply, to relate meaningfully, or to proclaim truth to real human need. An understanding of Scripture that fails to answer the hard questions about how to involve ourselves productively in one another’s lives is no real understanding at all.

All Christians who believe the Bible to be God’s inerrant, authoritative, and sufficient Word earnestly desire that their thinking be governed by the text and that it enjoy clear biblical support. But as we go to the Bible in search of answers to the questions that regularly confront counselors (such as What do I do with the withdrawn teenage girl who hates herself because her dad has been molesting her for three years and is still doing it?), a fifth set of troublesome issues emerges.

What principles of interpretation and application should control our efforts to draw from the text the information we need to help the victimized daughter? Do we really believe that the Bible is the right book in which to find answers to these sorts of questions? If so, how do we guard against finding support for positions that we already hold before we come to the text? Is the sincere, regenerate counselor schooled in neither formal theology nor biblical languages capable only of eisegesis and therefore dependent on trained theologians for real exegesis? If so, why do biblical scholars rarely answer the hard questions people ask about living?

Is the Bible a textbook for counselors or is it not? Some insist that the Bible reveals everything we need to know to be thoroughly equipped for living as Christians but then (I think inconsistently) refer people with psychological problems to specialists with professional helping credentials (i.e., counselors with training in extrabiblical thought). They accept the commonly made distinction between psychological and spiritual problems and consult the Scriptures only when dealing with the latter. Is that legitimate? Do psychological disorders really constitute a category separate from spiritual concerns? If so, what defines the distinction? Maybe agoraphobia is nothing more than a label for something that, properly understood, will be recognizable as a spiritual problem that the Bible addresses, at least in principle. Perhaps psychological problems and spiritual problems grow from the same root.

If, however, there are two separate categories of difficulty, can we trust the unregenerate psychologist to enlighten us about psychological problems, just as we trust a competent physician, whether saint or sinner, to diagnose and treat medical diseases? Or was Cornelius Van Til correct in speaking about the noetic effects of sin that taint every conclusion drawn by a nonbeliever with moral error?

Perhaps we should return to the other possibility, that there is only one category of disorder, that so-called mental illnesses and neurotic reactions are really complicated spiritual problems, relabeled and disguised, but still matters for which the Scriptures provide an adequate framework for understanding. If we follow this line of thinking, what then are we to do with the mass of data painstakingly collected by secular researchers? Ignore it as useless? Select those parts of it that support biblical notions and talk of pagans stumbling onto truth? Reinterpret through a biblical presuppositional grid what has been observed by secular psychologists?

The questions are endless. So too are the various answers proposed by Christian responders. The situation in the field of Christian counseling resembles (in every bad respect) the splintering of the evangelical church into competing denominational camps, with each one protecting its unique distinctiveness with all the vigor of a fight for life, and with each treating the others with sometimes benevolent, sometimes contemptuous, disdain.

Denominations among Christian counselors include a diversity of more or less well-identified schools of thought, some with all the trappings of an established movement:

•  Highly visible name leaders

•  Ardent, vocal disciples

•  Special conferences to which mainly the faithful come

•  An approved list of authors and speakers

•  Jargon that marks the user as among the initiated

The likelihood that substantial agreement will ever emerge from further dialogue and study is not good — no better, I suspect, than the prospects for developing an ecumenical position to which all conservative denominations would happily subscribe. Differences will remain, even among those committed to essential theological positions.

Perhaps this is not merely inevitable and therefore to be tolerated; perhaps it is good. In a world where the struggle to understand what God has said is carried on with imperfect minds, perhaps diversity of thought within a well-defined framework is healthy. Christians too often listen to one another in an effort to find points of difference rather than for mutual stimulation. The effect is to choke off the kind of creative thinking that could expand our understanding in uncertain areas.

Clearly articulating differing viewpoints and rambling about loosely formed ideas with a common commitment to let Scripture be the final arbiter could provoke productive examination of our own positions. We could then see more clearly where our understanding of things simply does not deal adequately with important issues. If we are in fact committed to a high view of Scripture, the effect will be to drive us back to the text, perhaps with new methods of study but certainly inflamed with urgent questions that need answers. In an atmosphere of mutual love, respect, and forbearance, dialogue could be profitable.

Dialogue among Christians (and non-Christians too), however, often degenerates quickly into division, tension, and hostility. A party spirit, nourished by misunderstanding and thoughtless rhetoric, encourages both a suspicious attitude toward any whose allegiance is outside our narrow circle and an unhealthy support for our kind. Why? Why is the community of God’s children so prone to pettiness and clannishness and backbiting when we of all people should evidence the most compassion when we disagree with one another?

The answer, I think, is both simple and tragic: We are defensive, proud, and threatened people. Advocates of one position sometimes assume that their sole purpose in inter-camp contact is to inform and correct, never to listen. We convince ourselves that we are standing for truth when in fact we are unthinkingly defensive. Because we rarely examine our own motives as we dialogue, preferring rather to believe naively that the Spirit of God is prompting our fervor, the discussion ends with each side self-righteously committed to its own position and piously rejecting of any other.

There is such a thing, of course, as a legitimate stand for truth. Christian missionaries must enter a Muslim culture determined never to compromise the true gospel in their efforts to build bridges with the people. They are there to proselytize, to convert others from a false position to a true position. Their clear purpose does not include a synthesis of ideas through dialogue.

Christian counselors, too, believe that the truth of God is not a flexible set of loose concepts that happily accommodates any thought-through position. There is truth and there is error, and the Bible is the ultimate yardstick for measuring which is which. Among Christians equally committed to biblical authority, there are substantial disagreements over matters such as ecclesiology, eschatology, and pneumatology, and we should hold our studied positions with sincere conviction.

But within the family of those who confess the lordship of Christ and the authority of the Bible, certain attitudes should be characteristic. Outsiders should easily see that we speak with one another in a spirit of mutual support and love. Instead, I fear, they more commonly observe an attitude that says, I’ll look to see where you step on my favorite toes, and then I’ll pull back with a cry of righteous indignation.

When our views as Christian counselors differ (as they inevitably will), we must remain true to our convictions as we seek to make clear our distinctives. And wherever we believe there is outright error or dangerous trends, we must take our stand, with gracious humility, but also with unwavering firmness.

The problem is that we really don’t manage to do this very well. Our sinful tendency is rather to quietly and unself-consciously enjoy criticizing a position different from ours. We shake our heads in sad regret over our brother’s or sister’s error while our hearts beat with the happy excitement of felt superiority. Declaring where someone else is in error, especially to a like-minded audience of appreciative followers, can be a heady experience, something like leading a high school pep rally before the championship game.

As Christians we, above all people, should recognize how we can deceive ourselves by attributing noble motivation to pharisaical haughtiness. Knowing our bent toward self-exaltation, we must take special precaution as we express our differences with one another. We should spend much prayerful time in examining our motives, expecting to find self-serving purposes. We must avoid inflammatory rhetoric masquerading as bold denunciation of error, replacing it rather with passionate but reasoned discussion of a fellow believer’s thinking. Boldness can easily become arrogance.

If the renewed (and welcome) concern with spiritual formation in evangelical circles is permitted to engage our continued interest in counseling that is biblical, we may see classical thought — Puritan soul care, Catholic mysticism, Reformed spirituality, desert wisdom — inform current dialogue about real change to shape a profoundly Christian understanding of personal growth. Hopeful glimpses of light are visible on the horizon.

But our efforts to understand and promote the kind of change made possible by Jesus still have the potential (some of it realized) to significantly divide rather than substantially bless. Our work can easily become a platform on which leaders erect monuments to themselves rather than serving as a framework for compassionate penetration of troubled lives with the truth of God. It can become the occasion for strife and hatred rather than the means of improving relationships among people who are commanded to love one another. But things could be different.

If biblical counseling is to realize its positive potential to glorify the God who alone can heal the brokenhearted and reconcile sinners to himself, I suggest that we submit ourselves to a few simple but easily violated guidelines as we discuss the subject.

Guideline 1: Articulate our positions carefully and nondefensively. Demonstrate their consistency with Scripture with a nonantagonistic fervor that matches our convictions about their validity and usefulness. Where conviction is tentative, fervor should be subdued. (Significant self-examination of our motives will be required to follow guideline 1).

Guideline 2: Maintain a willing openness to changing positions we currently cherish if we come to believe that change is warranted by previously unseen insights into Scripture. Evidence such willingness by attending conferences taught by other evangelical counselors. Seriously study and consider their views through face-to-face dialogue. Invite theologians to evaluate our handling of Scripture.

Guideline 3: Self-consciously labor to walk the tightrope of open conviction by working to avoid falling into either (1) accommodationism (openness to the point where unity is placed above truth), or (2) exclusivism (conviction to the point where condemnation of another viewpoint precedes understanding it).

We should agree when we can, disagree when we must, and cooperate whenever possible without compromising the pursuit of godly purposes.

In this book I attempt to observe these guidelines. My purpose is to present some of the fruit of my efforts to understand biblical counseling. I do not intend to further the development of yet another counseling denomination. I do intend to offer my ideas in a fashion that will stimulate further discussion, clarify misunderstanding, and drive us deeply into God’s Word with more questions.

Readers familiar with my earlier books will recognize movement in my concepts but not, I think, fundamental change. I continue to be quite comfortable with my earlier language. The human needs for security and significance are a shorthand way to express the deep longings in the human heart for relationship and impact. Either set of terms is fine with me. But some have interpreted me to teach that human needs for security and significance define our essential nature and therefore properly become our lifelong concern. The result, in the minds of some, has been a human-centered focus on fulfillment rather than a God-centered emphasis on obedience to God and preoccupation with his glory.

Because my choice of the term need has apparently communicated to a few what I do not believe and what I strongly oppose, I hope that referring to deep longings that constitute the thirst that our Lord alone can quench will better convey what I have always believed. Other movements in my thinking, some more than linguistic, will be apparent to the careful reader.

This book is intended to provide only a framework for thinking about counseling, discipleship, and spiritual formation. To know what questions to ask and what observations to point out during the counseling hour requires an intuitive feel for people that comes only through years of reflecting on people and working with them. Mastering the concepts in this book will not directly equip someone to function effectively as a counselor, but it will, I think, provide a basis for developing a good understanding of people. Discussion of how change occurs in people and how counselors promote that change must build on an understanding of how people operate and how their problems develop. This volume tries to lay that foundation.

As I write this book, my sincere prayer is that there will be a growing and friendly concern among evangelicals, splintered on many issues but united on essentials, to honor the preeminence of Christ and the authority of the Bible in all our counseling efforts.

Introduction

Jesus Is the Way

For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

1 CORINTHIANS 2:2

Isometimes wonder if the solutions to life’s problems are perhaps much simpler than our psychologically sophisticated culture expects them to be. The intricacies of Freudian theory have become less intriguing to the average person in today’s world than they used to be, and pop psychology, whether in Christianized or secular form, has retained its appeal now for decades. Many people are drawn to simple, uncomplicated answers to life’s most profound and troubling questions.

Perhaps the trend toward simple answers is good. Too often, of course, it encourages people to swallow naive ideas that ignore real complexities that must be taken into account for an adequate understanding of things. The trend may also reflect a desire to find painless, quick answers to replace the need for walking the costly path to real happiness.

But still, an openness to believing that there are simple answers may be an advantage. Perhaps the answers to important questions really are simple. Solutions to puzzling personal problems may be difficult to put into practice, but perhaps they are easy to grasp, or at least to state.

During literally thousands of hours spent trying to keep couples together, it has occurred to me more than once that if husbands would more strongly involve themselves with their wives and if wives would quit trying to change their husbands, most marriages would really improve. There’s nothing complicated about that. The major obstacle getting in the way of doing it is stubbornness, not limited understanding.

Children, I suspect, would become more manageable and infinitely more lovable if parents would answer, properly and with some consistency, a few elementary