Jay E. Adams

This is episode two in our series on the biblical counseling movement.

And today, we're turning our full attention to the man at the center of it all, Jay Adams.

I'm Jared Luchibor, joined again by Dr. Alan Strange.

It's good

So, Dr.

Strange, why don't you take the lead on this one?

Well, our students here, as part of their coursework, are familiar with who Jay Adams is.

And as you've intimated in the previous conversation, Dr. Poulton, many in our churches have heard that name, but they may not be sure exactly who this gentleman is.

But those whatabouts come about.

I almost wish that, you know, what was it? Jay Adams wrote the book, What to Do on Thursday, but it had to do with, you know, studying your Bible.

But I love the fact.

I think that's great from counseling and shepherding, what to do on Wednesday.

So joining us for all four of these episodes is Dr. Jared Poulton, who serves as executive director of the Institute for Reformed Biblical Counseling.

He's also the pastor of Counseling and Teaching at Cornerstone URC, which is in Hudsonville, Michigan, and author of Van Til's Counseling Movement, a critical analysis of Jay Adams and biblical counseling, a book just recently released this past week.

Dr. Poulton, welcome to Marscast.

It is a pleasure to be here.

heart.

So by the time of the 1960s, the psychologies were entirely secular, and many pastors did not see themselves as competent to counsel the complex issues that their church members were facing.

So a man named Jay Adams... who was well-known and we'll talk about further in these conversations.

He published a book called Competent to Counsel in 1970, and it was a challenge to the church to reclaim their heritage of caring for their church members and offering counsel to the needs of those within their flocks.

That's looking particularly at polity implications, but it would involve this.

Maybe a generation earlier, Jay Adams,

competent to counsel.

Yeah, Jay made everything right on that Roman, or not everything, but the initial phrase competent to counsel came from Romans 15, 14.

But, um, if, if we don't understand what our purpose is, then when we start thinking about how do I deal with this relationship, this conflict, this, uh, emotional struggle, fill in the blank, we're gonna have a hard time figuring out where do we need to go.

So one of the things Jay Adams used to say is, "Everybody knows that we need to change.

The question is, change into what? Where are we headed?" And so purpose helps us with that.

It helps us realize that we were created with an intended purpose.

That's good stuff.

So when it comes to this book in particular, I mean, what led you down this path to write about Van Til, Jay Adams and everything? Have you always been interested in that? Was it something you stumbled into?

No, thanks for the question.

So the book is my dissertation from Southern Seminary, kind of adapted, about 100 pages chopped off and then more edits made to it.

And if he is the bridge really into the past, he seems like a good person to start with.

So I kind of pivoted towards Van Til wanting to do some historical retrieval work.

If you go back to the 1970s when biblical counseling was starting, what was Jay Adams doing with Van Til's ideas? So then I graduated in 2024.

And the book that we have here is several more years of me wrestling with some of these arguments and sharpening them, hopefully for people to engage with.

And it takes that and it goes back to something.

In the Christian world back in 1970, it was kind of rocked when a book came out by a guy named Jay Adams.

He was a counselor, a Christian counselor, and the book was called Competent to Counsel, and it was based on Romans 15, 14, where the Bible says you are competent to counsel.

And so it was, all right, we as Christians, we're competent to counsel others.

But, you know, over the years, uh, we've tried to be clear, those, those in the biblical counseling movement really try to be clear on what we do and how that distinguishes itself from psychology, particularly secular psychology.

And so really where that started was with Jay Adams where, where he coined the term nouthetic counseling, and that was just...

That's a Greek term.

You know, one place it's used in the Bible is in Romans, uh, 15:14.