Study Materials for Christians
The following books provide inside information on one of the most prolific, subtle deceptions in the church today. Because of the importance of the information contained in the following books, the authors decided to make some of the chapters available for free download for the following books.
Christian Response to Mental Illness: Mutual Care in the Body of Christ
The Christian response to mental illness is one of the great tragedies ravaging the church today. This tragedy began with the rise of the medical model of mental illness. The medical model used in the world of medicine has been hopelessly hijacked by those in the field of mental illness. The implications threaten the very foundations of psychiatry, as they depend on the medical model for mental disorders. These implications also threaten the foundations of psychotherapy and the biblical counseling movement as it follows the psychological counseling format. The very terms mental illness, mental disorder, and mental disease have become a blight to society, as they have been misunderstood, misapplied, misconstrued, and misused by many in both society and the church.
PsychoHeresy: The Psychological Seduction of Christianity
Almost everywhere one turns in the church one sees psychology. The psychologizing of Christianity has reached epidemic proportions. It is has permeated churches, denominations, Bible colleges, seminaries, mission agencies and Christian media. It is everywhere, from psychologized sermons to psychologized persons. However, the psychologizing of the church is neither biblically nor scientifically justifiable. Beneath all the biblical reasons why Christians should not pursue psychotherapy and its underlying psychologies is this one fact: The use of psychotherapy and its underlying psychologies denies the sufficiency of Scripture for the issues of life normally taken to a psychotherapist. This book demonstrates the fact that psychological explanations about life and psychological solutions to life’s problems are questionable at best, detrimental at worst, and spiritual counterfeits at least. The well-documented seventeen chapters include such titles as “History of Psychotherapy,” “Psychotherapy Is Pseudoscience,” “Psychotherapy Is Religion,” “Self-Centered Gospel of Psychology,” “Amalgamania,” and “Broken Cisterns or Living Waters?”
Stop Counseling! Start Ministering!
Exposes the fallacies and failures of psychological counseling theories and therapies; calls Christians back to God’s Word and the Holy Spirit’s work; reveals the anti-Christian biases, internal contradictions, and documented failures of secular psychotherapy; and examines the various mixes with Christianity. Current research more strongly supports our original conclusions and concerns. Yet psychoheresy is more deeply and broadly imbedded throughout the church.
Person to Person Ministry: Soul Care in the Body of Christ
About a Christ-centered approach to nurture the spiritual life of believers and to equip them to fight the good fight of faith and thereby confront problems of living through exercising faith in Christ and the Word. This book also reveals the innate sinfulness of problem-centered counseling, shows how problem-centered counseling leads Christians into feeding the flesh and quenching the Spirit, and gives reasons why Christians must abandon the problem-centered approach. 256 pages, soft-bound.
Free eBooks
The following eBooks are full-length, PDF versions that can be viewed, searched, downloaded and/or printed. They are for your personal use only. Please do not post these eBooks on other websites without permission from the authors or publisher. In addition, a link is provided for all those books that are available in a paper edition format for those people who prefer printed books and for those who would like to purchase books as gifts.
Against “Biblical Counseling”: FOR the Bible
Competent to Minister: The Biblical Care of Souls
The End of “Christian Psychology”
Christ-Centered Ministry versus Problem-Centered Counseling
Counseling the Hard Cases: A Critical Review
12 Steps to Destruction: Codependency Recovery Heresies
Four Temperaments, Astrology & Personality Testing
The Psychological Way / The Spiritual Way
Most Christians agree that the Scriptures are a basis for mental-emotional health, but very few seem to believe that the Bible is sufficient to deal with all nonorganically caused mental-emotional disorders. Many in the church believe that the Bible provides preventative principles for mentalemotional well-being but hesitate to accept that the Bible contains restorative power. Martin and Deidre Bobgan maintain that God and His Word provide a completely sufficient foundation for mentalemotional health and that the Bible is the repository of the healing balm for all nonorganically based mental-emotional disorders. To support this position, much of the book, published in 1979, is devoted to exposing the faults and failures of psychological theories and therapies. In doing so, they explore the four streams of psychotherapy: the psychoanalytic, behavioristic, humanistic, and transpersonal streams. The book includes descriptions of the major ideologies, theoretical variations, and techniques that exist among the different therapies that emerged from the original theorists. Topics include descriptions of popular therapies and how many of these therapies and techniques are contradictory to one another. The book further emphasizes the conflict between human-devised psychological theories and the Bible.
Against “Biblical Counseling”: FOR the Bible
A necessary critique of the growing biblical counseling movement in America, spreading to other parts of the world alongside psychological counseling.
“Is biblical counseling biblical?” Though the question is simple, the answer needs explanation. This book is an analysis of biblical counseling—what it is, rather than what it pretends or even hopes to be. Its primary thrust is to call Christians back to the Bible and to biblically ordained ministries and mutual care in the Body of Christ, “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12).
Competent to Minister: The Biblical Care of Souls
Answers such questions as:
What can believers do to help individuals suffering from problems of living?
What should churches do for suffering souls?
What did the church do for almost 2000 years without psychological counseling?
What did the church do without the biblical counseling movement which began about 25 years ago?
This book calls Christians back to the Bible and to the biblically ordained ministries and mutual care in the Body of Christ that have effectively cared for souls for almost 2000 years.
The End of “Christian Psychology”
Reveals that “Christian psychology” includes contradictory theories and techniques.
Describes and analyzes major psychological theories influencing Christians.
Presents evidence to show that professional psychotherapy is questionable at best, detrimental at worst, and a spiritual counterfeit at least.
Challenges the church to rid itself of this scourge.
Christ-Centered Ministry versus Problem-Centered Counseling
The purpose of this book is to reveal the origins and faults of problem-centered counseling, to describe Christ-centered ministry and how it differs from problem-centered counseling, and to encourage local congregations to minister biblically without the influence of the psychological or biblical counseling movements.
Counseling the Hard Cases: A Critical Review
Counseling the Hard Cases is co-edited by Stuart Scott and Heath Lambert, seminary professors in biblical counseling. This Critical Review reveals that the lynchpin for Scott and Lamberet’s house of cards is their view of mental illness. Their fallacious view is a disaster in the making and a danger to those who counsel and their counselees. Believing, teaching, and promoting such a view of mental illness will lead to calamities as it places in litigious danger those who will foolishlyh follow and copy-cat counsel with confidence accordingly. This can easily be a great detriment and disaster to those who receive such counseling. This Critical Review issues the following warning: Do not blithely, blindly, and blatantlyh play follow-the-leader with the ten case studies showcased in Counseling the Hard Cases. Do not take literally these ten cases and the inferred claim that you, too, can cure through biblical counseling the hard cases listed in Counseling the Hard Cases.
12 Steps to Destruction: Codependency Recovery Heresis
This book includes essential information for Christians about codependency/recovery teachings, Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve-Step groups, and addiction treatment programs. The book examines such teachings and groups from a biblical, historical, and research perspective.
Four Temperaments, Astrology & Personality Testing
Examines personality types and tests from a biblical, historical, and research basis. The book answers such questions as these: Are there any biblically or scientifically established temperament or personality types? Are personality inventories and tests valid ways of finding out about people? What is the connection between astrology and the four temperaments?
Hypnosis: Medical, Scientific or Occultic?
Hypnotism is potentially dangerous at its best and is demonic at its worst. At its worst, hypnotism opens and individual to psychic experiences and satanic possession. When mediums go into hypnotic trances and contact the “dead,” when clairvoyants reveal information which they could not possibly know, when fortunetellers through self hypnosis reveal the future, Satan is at work. Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness. Satan transforms himself into an angel of light whenever necessary to accomplish his schemes. The moment one surrenders himself to the doorway of the occult, even in the halls of science and medicine, he is vulnerable to the powers of darkness. This book exposes both obvious and hidden dangers.
James Dobson’s Gospel of Self-Esteem & Psychology
Because of his tremendous influence in bringing psychology and self-esteem teachings into the church, Dr. James Dobson’s work is an appropriate subject for examination. What he has written and said is examined from both a biblical and scientific point of view.
There are pluses to Dobson’s ministry. However, after all the pluses and minuses are added together, it is concluded that Focus on the Family is an organization that too often honors man and his opinions over God and His Word.
Contrary to what he claims, this book demonstrates that some of Dobson’s basic assumptions and many of his specific teachings actually originated from secular psychological theorists whose opinions are based on godless foundations. Thus, Dobson uses the Bible as a sanction for dispensing unbiblical ideas to unsuspecting readers and listeners. The use of psychology to help people eclipses the Scriptures at Focus on the Family. Self-esteem and psychology are the two major thrusts that too often supersede sin, salvation, and sanctification. They are another gospel.
Larry Crabb’s Gospel
Dr. Crabb is well-known for his books on counseling and Christian growth. While he refers to his counseling model and methods as “biblical,” his psychological theories affect his teachings about the human condition, how people change and grow, and how they can find God.
Crabb interprets the message of the cross according to his psychological ideas about the nature of man and how he changes. The gospel becomes the good news that Jesus meets the needs/longings/passions which motivate behavior from the unconscious. Sin becomes wrong strategies for meeting the needs/longings/passions. Confession is telling our stories and gaining insight into those wrong strategies. Full repentance comes through getting in touch with the pain of the past. Hence, the gospel message itself is directly tied to a psychological construct. Not only is the doctrine of man psychologized, but the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are made subservient to Crabb’s psychospiritual theories.
Through the years people have argued, “But Larry Crabb has changed.” Has he? This book examines his writings from 1975 through 1997 to answer that question and determine the status of his approach to counseling and ministering the gospel of salvation and sanctification.
Missions & Psychoheresy
This book by Martin and Deidre Bobgan exposes the mental health professionals’ false facade of expertise for screening missionary candidates and caring for missionaries and explodes the myths that surround the psychological testing used on these hapless men and women. It further reveals the prolific practice of using mental health professionals to provide psychological care for missionaries suffering from problems of living.
CRI Guilty of PsychoHeresy?
Responds to the CRI/Passantino “Psychology & the Church” series. They demonstrate that CRI leaves an open door to integrating psychotherapy and its underlying psychologies with the Bible and explain why this should not be done. Leaving the door open to psychotherapy and its underlying psychologies is an overwhelmingly popular position in the church. It is always difficult to combat the popular socio-cultural mores of a society; but it is more difficult to fight against the absorption of these mores into the church. Admittedly, the Bobgans are presenting a minority view and unfortunately they are left with proving the case against something for which the case has never been made.The book exposes the logical fallacies and illogical reasoning used to establish the CRI/Passantino position on psychology and shows why the door to psychotherapy and its underlying psychologies should be shut.
Biblical Counseling Reviews
This book reviews the biblical counseling of Dr. Jay Adams, Dr. David Powlison, Dr. Heath Lambert, Dr. John Street, Dr. Jim Newheiser, Dr. Paul Tripp, and Pastor Randy Patten and reveals that the best examples of biblical counseling done by some of the foremost leaders of the biblical counseling movement have grave biblical errors.
The undoing of the biblical counseling movement does not primarily come from their teachings, but from their practices and presentations of actual counseling when examined with the Bible. This book is an exposé of what seven of the recognized leaders and teachers of biblical counseling actually do in counseling and why believers should shun their counseling conversations.
TheoPhostic Counseling:
Divine Revelation or PsychoHeresy?
. . . examines TheoPhostic counseling, a recently devised therapy appealing to Christians. TheoPhostic is a recovered memory therapy comprised of many existent psychological therapies and techniques, demon deliverance teachings, and elements from the inner healing movement, which include guided imagery, visualization, and hypnotic suggestion.
Page Reference Notification
Please note that page references to Ed Smith’s manual (Beyond Tolerable Recovery: Moving beyond tolerable existence, into genuine restoration and emotional inner healing) are for the pagination of the 1997 edition of the manual. Later editions have different pagination. Therefore the quotations may be found on different pages than those indicated in our book TheoPhostic Counseling: Divine Revelation or PsychoHeresy.
Ed Smith has also changed the format of his word “TheoPhostic” to “Theophostic” (without the capitalization of the “P”) and changed the name of his system from “TheoPhostic Counseling” to “Theophostic Ministry.” In the third edition of his manual he explains why. He says: “Ministry better describes what you would be doing. This may be important to the lay person who lives in areas of the country where it is becoming more and more difficult to counsel without state approval and certification. . . . If you are a lay minister I encourage you to discontinue the use of the word ‘counseling’ as a description of what you do. The legality of this term may be a point of indictment you might want to avoid” (p. 6).
El ministerio centrado en Cristo comparado con el asesoramiento centrado en el problema
Spanish translation of Christ-Centered Ministry versus Problem-Centered Counseling by the Bobgans.
El ministerio centrado en Cristo comparado con el asesoramiento centrado en el problema A lo largo de las Escrituras, los problemas de la vida son como oportunidades que se nos presentan para nuestro crecimiento espiritual. Son como tierra barbechada en la vida de una persona, durante la cual el Señior puede obrar poderosamente por medio de su Palabra, el Espíritu Santo y el Cuerpo de Cristo. ¿Se usarán de este modo? ¿Como podrán los creyentes estimular tal crecimiento espiritual? ¿Y cómo podríamos todos edificarnos y animamos unos a otros a confiar en que el Espíritu Santo concederá poder a todos los creyentes para andar según su nueva vida en Cristo?
El Fin de la PSICOLOGỈA CRISTIANA
Spanish translation of The End of “Christian Psychology” by the Bobgans.
Revela que la “psicología cristiana” incluye teorías y técnicas contradictorias. Describe y analiza las teorías psicológicas principales que influyen a los cristianos. Presenta evidencia de que la psicoterapia profesional en el mejor de los casos es cuestionable, en el peor de los casos es perjudicial, y por lo menos es un engaño espiritual. Reta a la iglesia a deshacerse de esta aflicción.
La Psicología: ¿Ciencia o Religión?
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