The Biblical Counseling Movement After Jay Adams

Most biblical counselors would dismiss the term schizophrenia as an unhelpful and confusing label. Heath Lambert has demonstrated, however, that the term has validity as a literary genre. The Biblical Counseling Movement After Adams is a number of contradictory things. It is a respectful recounting of the contributions of Jay Adams and a collection of harsh and unkind epithets about the man and his followers. It is both a carefully researched Ph. D. thesis and grievous academic malpractice. It identifies important issues within the biblical counseling movement and embraces as authoritative shoddily constructed straw men. Lambert praises concepts he himself finds questionable, and confuses movement with maturity, differences with development, and provocation with progress. Upon a careful reading of this book, biblical counselors who are familiar with the issues reported here will be made both thankful and appalled.

Lambert has a genuine respect and appreciation for Jay Adams. It is evident in his first chapter in which he surveys Adams’ early writings and places them in the context of the times they were written. It is a careful and complete survey and serves as a great introduction to the man and his writings. In his conclusion, Lambert correctly points out that Adams has always welcomed a careful examination of what he has written and invited others to build on what Adams himself admitted was preliminary (although not tentative). Lambert does just that. He seeks to identify specific areas where, in his view, Adams’ work was deficient—even erroneous—and marshals support for his conclusions by quoting as authoritative those who do not share his deep respect for Adams—many of whom have misrepresented Adams, and questioned his integrity, character, and scholarship.

As a credible scholarly work The Biblical Counseling Movement After Adams was doomed from the beginning. It began as a Ph.D. project at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville where Lambert teaches. His purpose was to chronicle what he perceived to be the “development” of the biblical counseling movement in its “second generation” iteration. In Lambert’s mind, it was to be a continuation—a volume two—of a dissertation written by David Powlison in 1996 and later published in book form in 2009. Continue at Institute for Nouthetic Studies