Christian Counseling Book Review: Brown, Term Paper

Providing a refuge through theraputic intervention and Biblical counseling for the troubled is one of the key challenges for any Christian counselors.

In fact, the notion of a refuge, Brown suggests, can provide an interpretive framework for almost the entire Psalter and the entire Biblical counseling process. A refuge is a reciprocal relationship, for it is a mutual exchange between a believer's trust in a Christian community, and a Christian community's trust in God and God's protective care and custody of the believer's soul. Counsling affirms the presence of a refuge, even during the most desolate of times, in the presence of the counselor and the understood presence of God.

The other Psalmic images Brown sees as significant for a potentially troubled believer are rocks, wings, the sanctuary presence of the Chuch, God as the King, and the pit or "Sheol" that provides a kind of counter to the image of a refuge of the arms and presence of God. A counselor can use all of these metaphors in making sense of a believer's life in a Biblical counseling session, asking the believer what is his or her rock, at present, what is oppressing his or her spirit, then asking what is necessary to give the believer's heart wings, and finally stressing how is God still present during even the darkest hours of the Christian's life -- how is God manifest in an image, for example? A rock might be a conflict with a spouse, wings might be a refuge from a looming financial crisis at work, and wings might be the believer's children and the love for his or her children and desire to make things better for the family.

By stressing such concrete images, the counseled Christian is forced to be specific about troubles, stresses, and also about available security networks and sources of real and moral support, when discussing problems, rather than to simply say vaguely that everything seems bad or good. Psalm 119 is also particularly useful in the way that it defines the righteous as one on move by walking and seeking, for a counselor ideally wishes to move the counseled person out of a comfortable zone of stasis, into a more productive path. The fact that God always is there, acting as a refuge for the believer, paradoxically enables the individual to moved on, as through God's salvific presence one's spiritual is never trod alone. Although the path may be rocky, using a vital metaphor of his own, Brown calls the refuge of God and the Psalms those "tectonic plates that give coherent shape to the Psalter's rugged landscape," and by extension the rugged landscape of life. (p. 53).

Thus, in the Psalmic metaphor of motion, even trees, such as the transplanted tree of Psalm 1 and the sun of righteousness of Psalm 19 that may seem to set but always rises again provides a vital contribution to the counseled and the counselor when aiding others. The metaphors of the Psalms, stresses Brown, because of the checkered nature of Israel's fate at the time of the Psalm's historical authorship are often dual in nature, such as that of water which can be both constructive and destructive, botht the waters of exile and the waters of one's native land -- and thus the metaphors of the Psalms are as paradoxical and fulfilling as modern life. Over and over again, Brown affirms the flexibity of the Biblical Psalms and their use in Christian counseling. Lastly, he stresses that useful metaphors can be found in the use of animals as metaphors, personal metaphors for God, and finally inanimate metaphors for God and he concludes with a brief study of Psalm 139 and a deconstruction of the corresponding icon. Image, metaphor, motion, and hope -- all of these are key themes that can be gleaned to tie the Biblical texts…