Dan Tries AI Biblical Counseling (#380)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Religion on the Mind

Episode: Dan Tries AI Biblical Counseling (#380)

Host: Dr. Dan Koch
Guest: Heather Patton Griffin
Date: February 16, 2026

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Main Theme

In this episode, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist and host of "Religion on the Mind," is joined by spiritual abuse researcher and returning guest Heather Patton Griffin to dissect his experiment with an AI-powered Biblical Counseling app. The discussion delves into the core features, assumptions, and potential dangers of both Biblical counseling—especially in its fundamentalist evangelical context—and the limitations of automating such deeply personal processes with artificial intelligence. The dialogue weaves in Heather’s influential framework about white evangelicalism’s “interior navigation system” and considers how theology, psychology, and technology intersect—with plenty of candor and critical insight.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Heather’s Framework and Biblical Counseling’s Foundations

(starts ~03:18)

• Heather developed her influential framework on evangelical “interior navigation” while observing a community where Biblical counseling was heavily relied upon.

• Dan positions Biblical counseling as the "logical mental health approach" within the worldview Heather describes.

• Three central concepts from Heather's previous episode are reviewed, shaping the critique of both traditional and AI-based Biblical counseling.

  a) "Knowledge is Easy"

  • White evangelicalism's approach is influenced by “Scottish common sense realism” and revivalist culture.
  • Knowledge is seen as accessible: "You don't need a degree... All you need to do is read this thing [the Bible]. It's right there in black and white and it is true." (Dan, 07:30)

  b) "Bible Facts"

  • Abstracted, context-independent fragments of scripture are treated as universal facts.
  • Examples include “The heart is deceitful above all things,” or “Be anxious for nothing.”

    “Bible facts are little bites of information that you can often just abstract out of context and decide that they apply... in all places at all times.” (Heather, 08:25)

  c) “Sincerity Culture”

  • Emphasis on willpower and belief. Problems are framed as the believer’s failure to “mean it hard enough.”

    “When biblical counseling is at its worst, I would describe its model of growth as try harder to mean it more.” (Heather, 11:42)

  • Sincerity becomes a measuring stick for repentance and healing. A lack of results is blamed on insufficient sincerity, not the model itself.

2. Biblical Counseling vs. Professional Therapeutic Models

(~13:58-18:57)

• Dan explains his bias as a licensed clinician and his father's advice to approach Christian counseling with nuance—distinguished from the one-size-fits-all "Bible fact" approach.

• Heather critiques the shallow exegesis often inherent in Biblical counseling, clarifying that wise practitioners can sometimes mitigate harm, but the system incentivizes “ascent and willpower” rather than holistic growth or repair.

  “All truth is valuable. So this is not a denigration of scripture. It's a concern about the picture of the human person and how people grow.” (Heather, 17:56)

3. AI App Experiment: Setup and Prompt

(~21:24)

• Dan role-plays as his 22-year-old self suffering from religious trauma and anxiety tied to Rapture/end-times teachings, plus hints of OCD, using a real (unnamed) AI Biblical Counseling app.
• Heather points out how even the language in Dan’s prompt (“spiraling”) might get policed in real Biblical counseling for being too “clinical.”

  "Spiraling would trigger them hard. Some people would be totally cool, but some people would police." (Heather, 24:01)

4. AI Response and Critical Review

(~24:29 and onwards)

• The AI-generated "personal summary" accurately reflects the situation but frames the root issue as a “struggle with trusting God.”

  “Indicating a struggle with trusting God's control over the future and his protection over your life.” (AI App, 25:00ish)

  • Heather flags the tradition's assumption that trust (like knowledge) is easy—a willful act.

    “Trust is very easy. Especially if somebody is sincere or they're telling you a true thing, you should trust them and so therefore you should trust God." (Heather, 26:24)

  • The mind-body and mind-emotion split in these traditions is highlighted. Embodied practices like walking or breathing are rarely offered; everything is reduced to "believe and try harder."

5. Assumptions & Victim-Blaming Risks

(~32:15-35:37)

• The AI implies anxiety stems from lack of trust, not trauma or neurological disorder.

• Both Dan and Heather warn of “victim blaming”—the tendency to attribute suffering to spiritual failure, ignoring trauma or mental health factors.

  “If you are trying hard to do everything that people say should work—if you have exhausted the resources of God—how bad are you? ...You must be really bad.” (Heather, 67:02)

• Trauma as a concept is often dismissed as “unbiblical” or “secular” in these circles, further marginalizing those who don’t fit the one-size-fits-all solution.

6. CBT Parallels and Scripture as Therapy

(~35:37-37:42)

• Heather notes early Biblical counseling borrowed from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—specifically “habituation,” or repeating scripture until belief is internalized.

  “Early biblical counseling was developing in...the early 1970s.” (Heather, 37:37)

• However, standard biblical counseling explicitly rejects “feeling” as valid—belief must trump emotion.

7. Scripture Solutions and Model Limitations

Key Takeaway Section (~39:09+)

• The app prescribes Psalm 121:1-2 as the “solution”—lift your eyes to God, trust Him, and memorize the verses.
• Both hosts analyze the shallow, “Bible fact” approach:

  “There’s no invitation to reflect on whether this Rapture theology that's freaking you out...could be the problem. It’s just taken for granted. The problem is you, because you should be able to recognize whether something isn’t true.” (Heather, 39:30)

• No validation of emotional experience or critical engagement with harmful doctrines.
• The advice may work for someone mildly anxious and already trusting scripture, but is potentially harmful, dismissive, or even re-traumatizing for trauma or OCD sufferers.

8. Secondary Scripture Connection

(~51:05)

• AI app assigns additional verses: Isaiah 41:10, Philippians 4:6-7, 2 Timothy 1:7—again, “Bible facts” instructing users not to fear or be anxious.
• Dan critiques: “Telling somebody not to be anxious or not to be afraid generally doesn’t help.” (51:33)
• Heather discusses the dangers of spiritual bypassing: “If you can't even ask why your feelings are that way in the first place, you're going to have problems. So this can encourage spiritual bypassing.” (56:55)

9. Anthropology & The Mind-Heart Split

(~57:15-65:39)

• The tradition interprets “the heart is deceitful” as “feelings are bad, mind is good.”
• Dan counters this is a misreading of both cognitive theory and the biblical authors’ intent; self-deception resides in the mind, which also interprets scripture and experience.
• The hosts explain that in both biblical and psychological anthropologies, feelings are signals, not deceptions, and the binary mind/heart split is both historically inaccurate and practically harmful.

10. AI vs. Human Biblical Counseling: Dangers and Degrees of Harm

(~65:39-67:02)

• AI lacks context, empathy, and adaptability—yet, paradoxically, may be less damaging than in-person biblical counseling for some, as users may more easily disregard it.
• However, for those deeply enmeshed in the belief system, both approaches reinforce blame and shame when prescribed solutions inevitably fall short.

11. Memorable Conclusion

• Dan and Heather affirm that while the Bible contains genuine wisdom, the mechanistic, “grow by willpower” approach of both biblical counseling and AI apps cannot address real pain or complexity—and may perpetuate harm.

  “It's not going to necessarily deal with the underlying problems...maybe anxiety is an appropriate response to being in a community that is unsafe in that way, and it's a warning signal that you should pay attention to so you can get out.” (Heather, 43:16)

• Heather: “They weren't bad people, but there were people who did a lot of harm in times when they didn’t understand the limitations of this model.” (68:27)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “When biblical counseling is at its worst, I would describe its model of growth as try harder to mean it more.”
  – Heather (11:42)

• “Knowledge is easy, trust is easy. Trust is very easy. Especially if somebody is sincere or they're telling you a true thing, you should trust them and so therefore you should trust God.”
  – Heather (26:24)

• “Telling somebody not to be anxious or not to be afraid generally doesn’t help.”
  – Dan (51:33)

• “If you can't even ask why your feelings are that way in the first place, you're going to have problems. So this can encourage spiritual bypassing.”
  – Heather (56:55)

• “If you are trying hard to do everything that people say should work—if you have exhausted the resources of God—how bad are you? ...You must be really bad.”
  – Heather (67:02)

• “It's not going to necessarily deal with the underlying problems...maybe anxiety is an appropriate response to being in a community that is unsafe in that way, and it's a warning signal that you should pay attention to so you can get out.”
  – Heather (43:16)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 03:18 — Introduction of Heather’s framework and the link to biblical counseling
• 06:45–11:07 — Core concepts: Knowledge is easy, Bible facts, Sincerity culture
• 13:58–18:57 — Contrasting biblical counseling and professional therapy; systemic deficiencies
• 21:24–29:00 — Dan’s prompt to the AI app and initial reflections on response
• 32:15–35:37 — Victim blaming; trauma and biblical counseling
• 35:37–37:42 — Biblical counseling’s early CBT influences
• 39:09–44:00 — App’s scriptural advice analyzed; limits and risks
• 51:05–56:55 — “Do not fear” Bible verses and spiritual bypassing
• 57:15–65:39 — Mind-heart split, anthropology, and problems with the model
• 65:39–68:42 — Comparative dangers: AI app vs. in-person biblical counseling

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Final Thoughts

Dan and Heather’s conversation is equal parts clinical analysis, theological anthropology, and cultural critique. While an AI app that dispenses “Bible fact” solutions is likely insufficient for most users—and dangerous for some—the episode articulates broader dangers built into the tradition itself. Scriptural wisdom, Dan and Heather agree, can be profoundly helpful, but healing—and growth—require more than willpower, sincerity, or cherry-picked verses. The conversation stands as a nuanced, compassionate, and at times biting critique of both technological and spiritual oversimplification.

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(Summary by Podcast Summarizer AI, preserving original speaker tone and insights as requested.)

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[C]

Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist. And that licensed therapist thing is going to come up today big time. I am joined by also big time friend of the pod, Heather Patton Griffin. Heather, welcome back.

[B]

Thank you, Dan. Good to see you again.

[C]

You've been on a few times, but most notably a longtime listener. Favorite episode. It happens to be episode number 123. So it's very easy for me to remember. 1, 2, 3, where we talked about really you laid out your kind of vision of the interior workings. I believe you called it the sort of interior navigation system of white evangelicalism in the States as you had experienced it. Your insights around that have proved to be quite valuable to myself and thousands of listeners. It's one of the episodes I get the most comments about still to this day from people. And what happened is I started engaging in this AI Biblical counseling. I mean, you know, half jokingly, let's be truthful here, but as I did it, I just kept thinking of your work and your concepts around that stuff. So I thought, hey, do you want to record? And let's talk about that. And let's also talk through my experiment with the Biblical Counseling app. The AI Biblical Counseling app.

[B]

Wait, there's a real app?

[C]

Oh, this is real? Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Did you not.

[C]

Oh, did you think that.

[B]

What?

[C]

Did you.

[B]

I thought you were just putting it in chat GPT for fun.

[C]

No, no, no, no. Okay. Yeah. Well. Well, I think that it will work out the same way. I must have not been very clear in texting you. I actually want to add one more wrinkle in which is that after I engaged in this experience that we're going to be talking through and I sent you the transcript and all that stuff, we'll be talking through it, I reached out to the CEO of this app, which I will not name, I'm not going to name it because I'm not trying to dox anybody, but I told him, I was like, here are my concerns as a therapist and a spiritual abuse researcher. Here's what I worry about. And he actually was like, hey, those are legitimate concerns. I'd love to hop on a zoom and talk shop with you sometime. So I may. I may follow this episode up with actually chatting with this dude. I don't know if that would be a good use of my time or not. Maybe time will tell.

[B]

I'm fascinated.

[C]

Yeah. So let me start the story and then we'll get to sort of your content. I want to go back to a few of those concepts from episode 123 that I kept thinking about as I was sort of doing this experiment. So I get a lot of emails.

[B]

Yeah, let me interject real quick, please. Part of the reason this fits so well for biblical counseling is that I came up with this framework while I was observing a community in which biblical counseling was highly relied upon.

[C]

Okay, that makes perfect sense. Yeah. I think biblical counseling, we might even be able to say something like, it's the logical mental health approach for the type of worldview that you describe. But let me set up the narrative here. So I get a lot of emails for potential guests to have on the podcast, right. And they can find an email address associated with it. And increasingly, these are AI written and they appear to be blasted out to as many podcast hosts as possible. I will just note briefly that I can now tell these apart very specifically because there will be one paragraph early on that is like a perfectly constructed couple sentences about the stated themes of my podcast, usually drawing on a particular episode. Your recent talk with so and so. And then it will make what is generally a fairly tangential connection between whatever happened in that episode and whatever this guest wants to talk about. And so it's a little bit of a source of frustration, it's a little bit of a source of entertainment, and it's a little bit of source of that bittersweet, sticky, where the hell is this all going? Dread about AI and stuff. So I mostly ignore these emails, obviously. But the other one, I got one from the CEO of this guy who said, my company, my app, and there are a bunch of these, so you're not gonna be able to tell. I don't think my app provides AI based biblical counseling. And I thought, what the hell, why don't I try this out? As if I were like kind of an average user. And then I thought, oh, I'm gonna sort of play a young version of myself. I sort of went back to like my early 20s and I put in a very simple prompt from that part of my life when I was dealing with panic attacks. I changed it a little bit to add in maybe some flex of ocd. Cause I have a lot of clients who struggle with ocd. I juiced it up a little bit just to see what would happen. Okay, so that's the basic setup. Now what I want to do now is talk about a couple of these ideas from episode 123, just briefly review them, because I think we'll be able to weave them in as we discuss sort of what's going on with this particular app, which is not as interesting as what it says about kind of biblical counseling. And maybe the limits of what some AI stuff can do, or maybe it's not an AI limit, maybe it's a limit in biblical counseling's worldview or something like that probably is where I would lean. So. All right, I've got three concepts from that conversation of ours. The first one is the idea that knowledge is easy. Heather, what do you mean when you say that within white evangelicalism? And by the way, it's been a while, that's just a contrast with black evangelicalism, which is just a very distinct form of Christianity in the United States. It's not like about race, it's just trying to be accurate. So white evangelicalism or predominantly white evangelicalism, what is it about that that you found? Oh, they think knowledge is easy to come by.

[B]

Right. Historically, white evangelicalism draws from something called Scottish common sense realism. So the particular historical moment that it develops in was very big on the ability of the common man, almost always men, by the way, to see reality as it is. And it draws from revivalism culture as well. It's a reaction also against theological liberalism.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

There is a preoccupation with facts as these free floating things out there that we can readily identify and all agree upon. And a sense that all knowledge can be gathered from the Bible by a sincere believer who is assenting to the right propositions doctrinally and who has good intentions.

[C]

Yeah, the Bible is really important there. Right. In part, knowledge is easy because the Bible contains in translation in your language. Oh, reader of the Bible who has basic literacy. The Bible contains all the important facts that sort of govern whatever we really need to know, to live our lives, to be Christians, to move through the world. Right. So because it's all right there. And we don't need to fuss about translation, we don't need to fuss about cultural context. It's all right there in the text. And so you don't need a degree, you don't need a high iq. All you need to do is read this thing. It's right there in black and white and it is true. And what is true? Well, it's these Bible facts. So that's number two, Heather. So what are Bible facts in this presentation of yours?

[B]

Bible facts are little bites of information that you can often just abstract out of context and decide that they apply to a particular situation in all places at all times. They're usually selected thematically, often highly selectively, without much attention to the context of the verse or to verses that might be held intention in the rest of the scripture.

[C]

So I'm thinking of a few examples that come to mind. Marriages between one man and one woman, that's like a Bible fact in, in this world all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. I think that'll just get repeated as a Bible fact. Right, that, that says something about like human nature, sinfulness or something. Can you give us a few other examples like read out some of these Bible facts?

[B]

Sure. One that I hear quoted a lot in the biblical counseling world is the hardest, deceitful above all things.

[C]

Oh yeah.

[B]

Be anxious for nothing. Philippians 4, 6, 7. I'm really surprised your chatgpt biblical counselor did not go for that one because that is the standard.

[C]

Hey, no spoilers. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Those are some of the big ones. And part of what goes on with identifying Bible facts is that the tradition that biblical counseling comes from tends to be fundamentalist. There are some that shade more into evangelicalism. That distinction is collapsing as it's becoming more radicalized and fundamentalist. Depending on the biblical counseling licensure group that you're dealing with, there's, there's multiple ones.

[C]

There used to be people like when my dad was practicing when I was a kid, you know, let's just say 30 years ago or something. There were probably people who called themselves biblical counselors, but who even had like a license, you know, in their state with a master's degree and actually were incorporating some general psychological principles. There was a bit of a gray area there for kind of more open minded evangelicals or something that is decreasing. And practitioners, as far as I can tell, seem to either go the professional licensed route and they will not call themselves a biblical counselor. They might call themselves a Christian counselor. You know, you can find a lot of practitioners on Psychology Today who talk about utilizing your faith toward your mental health, but they are licensed mfts or things like that. That's now where Those sort of middle ground people would have been. And then if they're not going that way because they probably think that secular psychology is in some way part of the problem, they're actually going to be more reactionary and go towards biblical counseling. That's my basic sense. Is that your sense?

[B]

Not really. There are biblical counseling traditions that are more integrationist, but I think their power is decreasing somewhat. I mean, I'm not in that world enough these days to have a clear picture. But there are multiple accreditation orgs, and the views that you and I would critique tend to be concentrated in two of them.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Maybe more.

[C]

The third and final of these three ideas. You briefly mentioned it earlier. You call it sincerity culture. My very short version of this is like, you just gotta believe those Bible facts, which are easy to know. They're right there in the text. You need to believe them, but you gotta believe them really hard. I think that's actually a phrase you used in that first episode. You got really. You believe it so hard.

[B]

Yeah. When biblical counseling is at its worst, I would describe its model of growth as try harder to mean it more.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And how do you know if you're meaning it hard enough? If it doesn't seem to be working? Well, I need to try harder. If I'm more sincere, I must be getting better. And on the ground, the ability to recognize sincerity in someone else is a big indicator about whether they are repentant and therefore whether their wife needs to forgive them for cheating, for instance, you know, whether it's time for her to get over it. You know, whether he should be brought back home.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Whether we should trust them again.

[C]

Yeah. That's interesting. It gets at something that I do want to sort of spend a few minutes on before we go into the script of what actually happened with the chatbot or the AI app, whatever you want to call it. And that is that a lot of these ideas, they do resemble concepts that I would work with quite happily, you know, in a secular therapy context. Like, there is a sort of sincerity in a couple that's dealing with betrayal. Right. Where you do need. Like, sincerity is a requirement.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Right. In certain ways, like, especially if one partner has been stepping out or talking with other people and sort of flirting with the idea of leaving and all that stuff. Like, that partner does need to be willing to go. I'm willing to stop doing this because our marriage is more important than that. And, you know, commitment, sincerity, seriousness, like, these are words that we might use. So the point is not that this is not a Valuable concept. It's just. It's carrying more water than it can carry. Than it can actually carry.

[B]

Yes. And because growth practice is collapsed to ascent and willpower. That's part of why sincerity carries so much weight here. Because, you know, sincere people who are sad about the harm they've done should be taking steps to become someone who will not do the same thing over again.

[C]

Right.

[B]

They should be looking at, like, what got me here, and they should be trying to repair the harm that they can as much as possible. And those steps are often lost in the more toxic forms of biblical counseling that I've seen.

[C]

Yeah, that kind of gets me to that second point here around that, which is that I know that I've got probably an extra bias against biblical counseling because I did opt for the five years of school doctoral education licensure route. And that also comes on the back of the way that my dad talked with me about therapy in an explicitly Christian context. You know, he mostly had Christian clients. He got most of his referrals from pastors. You know, like, that was his world. And he had some thoughts about it. And I mostly agree with what he said. You know, as I think about it, with my education now, I think back, I think, yeah, I mostly agree with my dad. But, like, the Bible is incredible. Like, one thing I want to make sure to not say is, like, oh, you could go to a therapist or you could read a bunch of bullshit nonsense in the Bible. Like, those aren't the choices. The Bible is an insane, valuable collection of wisdom literature over, you know, 1300 years or more, depending on where you start, the oral traditions of some of the Old Testament. And there are things in the Bible. There is actual wisdom and truth in the Bible. And many times applying a true idea to someone's situation is gonna have a good effect. Right? Like if, for instance, you had a couple, like I was just mentioning, where really the problem was that the person was not being sincere. And you can maybe get a way to get them to realize they need to be sincere. Or another idea I thought of was, like, you know, you could mangle this, like, unequally yoked sort of language or stuff around. Like, you know, it's sort of like the you are what you eat version of who you spend time with. Like, well, that's also true. Like, it is true that if somebody were to get a verse about that and then maybe they stop spending so much time with these people and they start spending more time with these other people, their life will change. Like, that's a sound concept. I'm not saying that the Bible does not contain bits of wisdom that have made it down through the centuries to us that if applied correctly to your life experience won't help you. That is obviously true in many situations. But that's different than the tenets of biblical counseling as we are describing it here. And it'll be interesting for you to tell me as we get through it where this type kind of fits into your typology of biblical counseling. But what would you say about that last point? Like where it isn't that there's nothing good in the Bible for counsel. It's that this model is insufficient to certain tasks, like fill that out for us.

[B]

It's very shallow exegesis of the Bible itself. Yes. It's not teaching people. Typically it is. So mileage may vary. You can get very wise people who are bringing in tools, information that are much richer than what the biblical counseling tradition necessitates.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, people can have better practices than their theory. They can also have worse practices than their theory. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So a lot of it will have to do with, you know, do people know how to meditate on Scripture? Biblical counseling, when it gets really bad can encourage a sort of anxious, obsessive trying to ramp up sincerity and white knuckle it, which is very different from what you would learn if you were taught how to do lectio divina. So meditation on scripture can be really helpful if you're ruminating. Like memorizing psalms was so good for my mental health in my 20s. I need to get back to that.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's great. From breaking free of ruminating thoughts. You know, like all of that is really valuable. All truth is valuable. So this is not a denigration of scripture. It's a concern about the picture of the human person and how people grow.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Which I don't ultimately think is biblical, but because it's so strongly claimed that this is just self evidently biblical, people get tied into knots because they feel like if they're challenging this, it sends them into despair. Like they're just bad people who can't get this right and aren't trying hard enough. And they have everything they need. So there must be something wrong with them because they're not getting better. Like in really awful forms of biblical counseling, they'll just fire you if you don't do your homework. They'll without asking, like, you know, is this really what this person needs? Why are they having problems doing these assignments? So it's very much A1 size fits all thing. When it's done well, you get really kind, loving people showing up around you who have good discernment and who are doing a much more nuanced assessment of how to walk with you. But you don't have to do it well to be an authority in that system. You could be a respected leader and be absolutely harming people and never know because it's always their fault that they're not getting better with the help that you're sincerely giving.

[C]

Gosh, yes. And, you know, briefly contrast that with, you know, I'm licensed by the state of Washington. If I fuck up enough of my clients, I will eventually not be licensed anymore. Right. And I will be barred from licensure. There is, you know, no such thing. I mean, you could maybe be barred from one biblical counseling organization, maybe if they believe the people who are making the, you know, the complaints or whatever. But you could probably find another one after that. Or you can do the Mark Driscoll, you just move to Arizona and start a new church. Like, you know, there's nobody stopping him from doing that. I would be prevented from being a licensed mental health worker in the United States, and I couldn't do that. There's also the safeguards. Okay, so a quick ad break and then we're gonna come back and I'm gonna talk through what I said to the app.

[D]

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[C]

Alright, so as I said earlier, I wanted to show up as my 22 year old self with slight change. So the part that's autobiographical is that when I was 22 I was actively plagued by religious trauma that stemmed from end times teachings which were inappropriately shared with me at age 11. Okay. So I was traumatized by thoughts that the world would end and that my life would end in about six months. April 1995 to September 1995, right? Something like that. Five months. And so I thought I'm going to do a prompt as if I'm back at 22 struggling with this stuff. And and for good measure, because I want to kind of see if it'll notice it, I'm going to throw in a hint that there's maybe some rumination OCD type stuff. So after creating an account with a 14 day free trial, I was given the prompt to share my situation. And this by the way, is something that I think in theory AI could be helpful with that. The ability for a user to put in plain language and have a computer help that user figure out what that means in clinical language like that is a genuine help of artificial intelligence. So I wrote I get really afraid when something reminds me of the Rapture, the Antichrist or whatever. It can ruin my whole day and send my mind spiraling for hours at a time. Sometimes I have had to stop projects with other people because I can't control it. That's a reference to I had to leave an album that I was co producing because of a massive panic attack at one point. So the two little details there, if you're paying attention whenever something reminds me. So reminds me I used as like a this is a trauma trigger probably, right? And then the second clue quote spiraling for hours at a time indicates to me at least a decently high level of anxiety, but certainly something that I would be following up with questions to Clarify if there might be some obsessive compulsive traits here. So that's what I put in, by the way. What do you think of that prompt? How did I do, Heather, for, like, getting this thing set up right?

[B]

So if you were going to an actual biblical counselor, there's a good chance your language would get policed for being too clinical.

[C]

That would be too clinical?

[B]

A little bit. It depends. Mileage may vary.

[C]

Again, it reminds me, spiraling. Is that the word spiraling?

[B]

Spiraling would trigger them hard.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Some people would be totally cool, but some people would police.

[C]

I think of spiral as just a normal term that people use. Like, I use it with clients because it's the sort of everybody knows what that means. It's like, it doesn't carry a lot of, like, ideology behind it or something. It's like, oh, it feels like a spiral. Like, it continues and keeps going. Wow.

[B]

These can be fairly. These are fundamentalist communities. They can be fairly closed.

[C]

Okay, fair enough.

[B]

So they're not talking with the rest of us.

[C]

So after waiting a few minutes for the response to show up on the app, which, given my experience with ChatGPT, like, was very slow, I gotta say, it was very slow, especially for what it gave back. Okay, but I'll start by reading the personal summary section. They gave me a few sections, sort of like a ChatGPT answer would. So it gave first a personal summary, and it said, quote, you are experiencing intense fear and anxiety related to thoughts of the Rapture and the Antichrist, which disrupts your daily activities and leads to withdrawal from projects. Let me just pause and say, that's pretty good clinical reflection. That's accurate. It said it back to me. I read. I go, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Okay, but then this fear hinders your ability to focus and engage with others. Still fine. Indicating a struggle with trusting God's control over the future and his protection over your life. That's really where all the good stuff is going to be in the personal summary, indicating a struggle with trusting God's control over the future and his protection over your life. I'll say one nice thing about it. The word indicating I like. Because that's not black and white. There is a little bit of room there for me to go, well, maybe that's not exactly what you mean. So I'll give it, like, I'll give it a couple points for indicating not showing or revealing or something like that, which, you know, you could use sort of synonymously. I have a couple notes here about this section, but I'd love to hear yours first. Heather.

[B]

In some biblical counseling traditions or just out in the wild, trust is treated as a very easy thing to do. It's treated as a choice.

[C]

Knowledge is easy, trust is easy.

[B]

Trust is very easy. Especially if somebody is sincere or they're telling you a true thing, you should trust them and so therefore you should trust God. And so people who are in these traditions don't necessarily have a sense of how trust is built or trust is broken and they feel really bad if they don't trust God enough. And so if you're coming from a really loving home, that's not going to happen as like as often, depending on who else is an authority figure for you, who else are you listening to? What are your other experiences? But if you're able to form a secure attachment to God, you're probably not going to be having this issue in the same way. So you know, you can come from like a pretty secure family and then have intense rapture anxiety, for instance, just because that was in the water all the time and that made you not feel safe with God.

[C]

And I had a, and for me I had a genetic predisposition to panic disorder. My mom has it, my grandpa probably had it. You know, I kind of came by it honestly in that sense. Yeah.

[B]

Well, biblical counseling has a very firm mind, body split. So even though this is a religion that believes the incarnation is important, that creation is good, you don't have bodies and you never learn an embodied practice. Like, you know, it might be really helpful to go walk and you know, memorize a psalm or something. You know, that could be good, but that's not necessarily going to be in the toolkit. You know, it might be helpful to breathe.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, because you have a body that requires respiration.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

That's not going to be in the toolkit because this is going to be seen as primarily, it's either a mental problem or it's a purely physical problem.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So there's not a sense of those being interlaced in any kind of nuanced way or that you could do a bottom up approach that focuses on the body to calm you down and certainly not on, you know, where are these trust issues coming from and how could trust be rebuilt rather than just telling yourself to trust and shaming you for not trusting.

[C]

Yeah. Okay, so back to indicating a struggle with trusting God's control over the future and his protection over my life. I noticed two assumptions in this half sentence. The first assumption is that God indeed has control over the future. Now, as you would agree, for the type of people who are gonna be using this app, or anybody who's gonna self select into biblical counseling, that is probably a reasonable assumption to make. Just in terms of like, who are our users? I don't think most of them are like up for a chat about open theism or whatever that like maybe or process theology or whatever. I think that's fine. But the reason I mention it is not because they should have done it. I wouldn't do anything different if I were making an app like this for that audience. Like, probably be unhelpful, but I do think there's potential therapeutic value with my clients, for instance, and it made me think of this to look more closely at this question. Does anybody actually know for certain that God is in control, entirely in control? What does it feel like when you consider the idea that God might even choose to not be in control of everything? Maybe to put you in control of some things, like what would come up if we sit with this potentially destabilizing idea that God does not control everything and that like, we have a real part to play here or something like that. And you know, that would be. Can be quite destabilizing for people. Of course we're not going to get anything like that in this app, but that did come up for me.

[B]

Sure. This is a systems blind tradition. So everything is about individual sin that is usually consciously willfully chosen. And you can consciously willfully choose not to.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So I think a microcosm of the macrocosm of a picture of God being absolutely in control of everything. However people are construing that would be as someone made in the image of God with a rational mind. I am therefore in control of everything. So the way this would play out is like, all right, so a classic scenario. One of the problems with the anthropology here is that it's very misogynist, extreme complementarianism. And women are seen as less rational and more prone to being swept away by their emotions. So if you have less power in the system, which almost all women do, unless they are gaining power by being enforcers and controlling other women, you are almost always the problem and you're having to absorb the immaturity of people with more power.

[C]

So Holly Beth Stuckley.

[B]

So, yeah, yeah. So when this goes very badly, and again, not everybody would do this, you can find some really loving people who are gonna show up for women in crisis and walk them through it. And they're not gonna do everything perfectly. But like there are people who are doing good care here, but I mostly see it when it goes wrong. So part of the gendered thing is that some sin is seen as less bad than others or it's leveled when it's convenient. There's a sort of capitulation to men are always going to have pornography addictions. So like, you know, you just gotta be patient with their struggles and make sure you're having sex with them. Because if you don't have sex with them as they're, you know, if you're with your husband enough, that's why he's going to porn.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So women are made to absorb the immaturity of men. It can go the other way, but usually women are bearing the cost of other people's immaturity, whereas women are very tightly policed if they're not forgiving or trusting as soon as the counselor thinks that they need to be.

[C]

Yeah. The second assumption that I pick up in here is that the cause of the, quote, intense fear and anxiety is indicated. That the cause of that I'm thankful for, indicated that is either definitely or very likely caused by my lack of trust in God. And you've already talked about this a little bit of like, trust is easy because knowledge is easy. Trust is easy. Hear the bible facts, just believe them and really bear down, white knuckle it and believe them. But speaking clinically, a couple other things come up for me in terms of, well, what might be the cause. And I sort of put little hints about this in the prompt. So first, potential cause, trauma. Right. Second, potential cause, ocd or similar. Like ocd, like tendencies or whatever. And in either case, obviously this is not the intention of the app developer or whatever, but in either case, there's a serious risk here of victim blaming.

[B]

Oh, that happens all the time. And I would say too, like, trauma is a very dirty word in most of these circles. There are some integrationist groups who are much more nuanced about this. But for the most part, trauma. Trauma is a trigger word for them. It says that you are being unbiblical, that you are into secular psychology. It's like believing in evolution. You know, they don't. They. They're dismissive of.

[C]

How would they. Okay, I get that as a term, but. But what I'm actually, what I'm saying is just asking me as a psychological professional, I'm saying a possible cause is trauma. Now, I would guess that most people who do biblical counseling would not say that war veterans cannot get ptsd. Would they really think that. That PTSD is in their Mind or something.

[B]

It depends.

[C]

Someone who survives a massive earthquake or a tsunami or a really gnarly car accident where the rest of their family dies, like they wouldn't think, oh, maybe that caused something to not lack of faith.

[B]

So it has been a struggle within the biblical counseling movement to even have those sorts of conversations. There are people even in the fundamentalist groups who are trying to have them again, usually because men are struggling.

[C]

Well, whatever it takes, Heather.

[B]

Yes, but the solution is still try harder to mean it more.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so sad. Yeah.

[B]

A trauma response is one of those areas where, you know, there is clearly a mental component and there is clearly a neurological, physiological response. There are parallel struggles that have happened within psychiatry and psychology as they've developed as disciplines. And you know, those are, those are still tricky areas. But biblical counseling communities tend to have, again, a very hard mind, body split. And even if there is an acknowledged physical component, almost always the solution is going to be cognitive and meditating on scripture. They wouldn't necessarily be opposed to medication, but that would be the zone of just the body. Are you aware that biblical counseling early on cribbed from early cognitive behavior therapy?

[C]

You know, maybe not that. Like, I am aware of how conversion therapy specifically draws or drew on some gestalt techniques as well as some of the, like, behaviorism stuff around, like reconditioning. So I know that some of these traditions do feel free to use certain insights from clinical and sort of secular psychology. But I don't think I knew the specific connection around biblical counseling and cognitive stuff.

[B]

It's early on and it's controversial because Jay Adams, I don't think acknowledged it, but it's also not unclear. So, yeah, like, you don't have to believe in habituation to become licensed as a biblical counselor, but it's part of the early toolkit from kind of first wave cognitive behavior therapy.

[C]

So, I mean, we're thinking Aaron Beck in mid 20th century, like it really matters how our minds interpret stimuli and experiences and we can actually work to change those interpretations. Is that that the kind of the basic stuff you're talking about?

[B]

I mean, probably, I think more leaning towards habituation by repeating thoughts. So, I mean, you're the clinician, so you would know more about how CBT looks. I don't know if you would know how it historically looked.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

When it was first developing habituation.

[C]

So, yeah, like repeating stuff until it feels more true to you. Is this the idea?

[B]

They wouldn't, they definitely wouldn't say feels. They would say until you believe it.

[C]

Until you believe it more or you're trusting it. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, that's. I have a personal project to go back and like read Aaron Beck, the original kind of few books that he wrote that sort of launched cognitive therapy because it is one of the forms that I practice, but I haven't done that yet. So habituation, that's not a technique that sort of made it into my 2000s cognitive training. Maybe other cognitive therapists did. And that's just kind of what I've read and stuff. But. Okay.

[B]

Yeah, well, early biblical counseling was developing in like I say, the early 1970s.

[C]

Yeah. So that would. Timeline. That would make sense. Okay. All right, so next section in my AI summary, key takeaway. So there's a key takeaway, which is one passage, and then there is later we will get to the final section, Scripture connection, which gave me three more passages. Okay, so this is the key takeaway. Here is the main passage that helps me with my problem. Psalm 121:1 2 teaches that God is our help and protector. This passage encourages you to lift your eyes to God, trusting him as the Creator who watches over you and provides security regardless of the fears you face about the future or end times. So we can see how it's using the kind of AI technology to sort of phrase this in a way that brings in the language that I used to make it applicable, much like it used the large language model stuff to like reflect accurately back to me what I had said. So that's kind of where the AI is doing stuff here. But the biblical counseling part is here. Here's the verse. And Psalm 121 is, of course, I lift up my eyes to the mountains. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. I want to give you the first shot at this, Heather. So what did you think of when you read this part of the readout?

[B]

I mean, it's an interesting choice. I do see that we have our Philippians four down below. So.

[C]

Wait, we gotta save it. Oh, yeah, it is there. Yeah. Yes, it's in the scripture. Connect the secondary section.

[B]

Yeah, but Psalm 121. So notice that there's no invitation to reflect on whether this Rapture theology that's freaking you out, like whether that could be the problem.

[C]

Of course, that can't be the cause.

[B]

It's just taken for granted. The problem is you, because you should be able to recognize whether something isn't true. This app is not encouraging you to reflect on problematic doctrine and teaching, which an actual biblical counselor might. They might say like, hey, this is.

[C]

They might. A real one might be like, hey, 10 to 15% of the world's Christians believe that this is how it goes. You know, like maybe we could consider what the 85% of other world Christians believe. Like a real person might do that or whatever. This app is not noticing that or interested in that.

[B]

Right. But dispensationalism is often part of these cultures. Depending on the tradition that you're in.

[C]

It'S usually baked in. And if it's there, it's really baked. Right.

[B]

So you can't question that. And also, even if something were untrue and harmful, the problem is still you and your responses to it. So there's not a lot of validation going on. Like, it's understandable that you would be freaked out about this.

[C]

Let me briefly say, just for listeners who haven't heard me talk about those ideas in a long time, Dispensationalism is the idea that the Bible presents these different epics, these different periods of history that they call dispensations, during which God interacts with and sort of has different attitudes toward humanity or toward the nation of Israel and then a later dispensation after Jesus, it's to everybody. And then they have these dispensations that they sort of draw out from the Bible about the future. And within that there are specific forms of dispensationalism like premillennial dispensationalism, which ends up with the common left behind. Sort of there'll be a rapture, an Antichrist, a seven year tribulation. There are innumerable camps at each of those points. You can find people who have different takes on all of that. But that idea is really baked into kind of Southern Baptist theology, American revivalist theology, kind of across the board. It comes out of England. What is that? Bible. The Scofield Study Bible, which was Scofield Bible.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

One of the most popular books ever published in the United States still to this day. And so just massively popular.

[B]

It's the Bible facts.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

Yeah. This is a tradition that sees the Bible or often will treat the Bible as Legos of Bible facts that you can assemble to form the right picture.

[C]

Or as Christian Smith would say, like pieces of a puzzle that if you got it all lined up correctly, would make a coherent picture. And that's what the Bible contains. And then it's our job to do that. I mean, he's disagreeing with that. He's saying it doesn't work that way. Yeah.

[B]

Yes. And if knowledge is easy, you should be able to make the connections properly and identify which verses are available, which.

[C]

Is why it's problematic that there are 10,000 such puzzles that have been made out of the same pieces.

[B]

Sure.

[C]

Yeah. Okay.

[B]

Yeah. So looking at the key takeaway, I like meditating on psalms, but I'm bringing other things into that practice. You know, I brought a tradition in which it was safe to bring my fears to God, in which I didn't think God was going to shame me for being anxious, in which I was approaching memorizing psalms primarily as a form of connection. So there's a difference between trying to make yourself trust God by talking about how trustworthy God is and actually learning to spend time with God and connect with God in order to build trust.

[C]

Like you were saying with Lectio, like how to meditate on Scripture, right? Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. And some people are taught that in this world, like if you have somebody who mentored you and taught you how to read scripture well, and that is a place of safety for you, you're not going to be as damaged by this. And you might find it helpful.

[C]

Totally.

[B]

But it's not going to necessarily deal with the underlying problems of why are you constantly being exposed to these teachings and what sort of community are you in that is pushing them? And maybe anxiety is an appropriate response to being in a community that is unsafe in that way, and it's a warning signal that you should pay attention to so you can get out.

[C]

I tried to be charitable with this key takeaway scriptural insight. And so I was trying to think, who is the kind of person for whom this would be genuinely helpful advice? And here's my best shot. Two things would need to be true. Number one, the person who put in the prompt would need to have been overstating the fear and anxiety. Right. If it really knocks them off their game all day long, if they really spend hours ruminating on this fear of an antichrist, then clinically speaking, I have a hard time believing that a person like that simply being asked to read and memorize later, oh, wait, later it's gonna tell me. My homework is to memorize these two verses.

[B]

Just those two verses, Just those two.

[C]

And then some other stuff. But, like, unless they're overstating it, I have a hard time believing that this would be sufficient to the task. Like, basically, there better not be any OCD or even similar tendencies. There better not be any trauma present. Maybe someone with just like, low grade general Anxiety. This would genuinely help them, connect them to their faith. I mean, meditating on the idea that my help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven, Earth, that is not a bad idea. There's nothing in that idea that I think is, like, damaging for somebody. It's just. It's being applied to a situation for which it's not to the task. So that's. That's the first one. Any response there?

[B]

I can see it being damaging depending on the person's history. So if you have an experience where, like, really bad things happened to you or somebody that you loved and it does not feel like God was protecting you, then this is gonna be salt in that wound.

[C]

Right. To be clear, I just mean that the concept in a vacuum of, oh, my help comes from the creator of the universe. That concept is not a harmful concept. That concept being deployed as, here's the solution to your problem is where it could be harmful. I think we're agreeing there.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

[C]

A person with a traumatic history like you're describing, if they said to me, I had this really difficult period of my life, and eventually I came to find some solace in the idea that I do believe in a creator and that that Creator loves me and wants to help, I would be like, great, that's good. I have no issues with that concept.

[B]

But the danger of AI, and this can often happen in real biblical counseling as well, is that they're not necessarily getting to know you. The AI is definitely not getting to know you. They're not getting to know your personal history. They're not doing that sort of background assessment and needs assessment, and that can be very dangerous. I would agree. If somebody's having anxiety and OCD and they're taught just to meditate on and memorize these verses, that can escalate their anxiety and ocd. Especially if they're not bringing in background practices that can help them do that. Well, that could just make it worse, and then they're going to feel worse, and then they're going to feel like they're not really saved or something.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I think most people who would have put the prompt in the way I wrote it, this is not good for them. You know, I'm trying to be charitable and think of who is a person who might have written this prompt that this would be helpful. And basically what I come to is they have to have written the prompt incorrectly. They have to, like, really have overstated the problem or something like that. Like, if that prompt was authentic, then this is not good. This is not good advice. The second one, we've really kind of already talked about it. I'll just say it really quickly. This person would need to, in order for this to really be helpful, they need to have a really high confidence in the trustworthiness of scripture, that this line here is gospel. It is unassailable. But like you're saying, these are essentially background assumptions of this entire world, including the biblical counseling models. So. Well, here's where it's interesting with the AI thing and these apps and this is just a thing you can get on your smartphone. So this is different than like, here's an interesting question, Heather. It's kind of like biblical counseling jumping outside the context of a group of people who roughly do share those same assumptions about the Bible and whatever. There's an additional danger here with people who just go, let's say I'm a 22, right. So I'm pretending to be my 22 year old self. I'm a 22 year old college guy and I sort of Christian and I, I have a sense that, oh, biblical counseling, that sounds good. And so I, someone tells me about this app and I download it like it's just scripture being thrown at me in the void. Like I don't have the context of the biblical counselor's office space where they might have some introductory stuff that they do with me in the first session. They explain what we're doing here and, or even like know which church they attend or are connected to. Then I could look at that church's website. There's none of that. This is just like, here, let AI give you Bible. And that is. There's an additional concern there.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it assumes that it's really easy to find what scripture is relevant for your problems. It assumes that there is like a brief scripture that is relevant.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

It's problematic all around. Honestly, the personal summary does a better job validating than a lot of biblical counselors I've known. So, you know, you might.

[C]

Yeah, okay.

[B]

I could see this being less damaging than some of the worst case scenarios. But for the people that I've seen do this, well, they are such kind and gentle people that make you feel really loved and hurt and you can kind of borrow their faith and hope that God will show up and they'll walk with you throughout whatever you're going through. You're not going to get that from AI.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

But AI is not going to yell at you.

[C]

It won't yell at you. And also some people would try out this app get this and be like, well, that was lame. And so. And that would be a lot less damaging than, my pastor recommended this biblical counselor. I went to three sessions and then I found it unhelpful. That would be a lot more destabilizing than. I tried this app, and I didn't find it helpful. You just move on. You try something else. Maybe you go to your university counseling center and everybody wins. Okay, we have a final section here. So we've gone through our personal summary, we've gone through our key takeaway, and now we are at our scripture connection. And this gave three other verses. It gives a little description of them. So a little summary. So I'll read kind of what was written there. And then I did print out the actual verses if we want to talk about them. But it just says, Isaiah 41:10 reassures you not to fear, as God is with you, strengthening and upholding you. Philippians 4, 6, 7 advises prayer and thanksgiving to combat anxiety, promising God's peace. 2nd Timothy 1:7 reminds you that God gives a spirit of power, love, and self discipline, not fear. Together, these verses emphasize God's presence and peace, inviting you to trust him amidst your fears. What's your response to that?

[B]

So there's no real growth process here other than repeating true things. Yep. And trying harder to mean it more. These verses can be incredibly comforting. Again, if you know how to connect to God, if you've got good support around you, if you know how to pray in ways that are not going to escalate your anxiety and just bring you more shame and shut you down. But telling somebody not to be anxious or not to be afraid generally doesn't help.

[C]

I'd like to go further on that. Can we talk about that for a second, Heather? Yeah. I'm getting, as listeners know and are maybe already annoyed with. Hang in there. You're going to have to deal with this all year, if not longer. I'm getting really into existential psychology and existential therapy. It is the other half of the cognitive part of my. I'm a cognitive existential therapist and I thought, you know, I'm done with school, I'm done with all my basic training. Like, let's dive in. Let me. I want to. You know, that's not the kind of thing you get specific training on in grad school. It's the kind of thing you have to sort of opt into. So I'm opting in right now. I'm loving it. I'm finding it extremely interesting. This point right here is an extreme point. Of disagreement between an existential psychologist and maybe a psychologist who would adopt a biblical counseling approach. Like maybe something that James Dobson might have believed. Right. This idea that you can sort of not be anxious that God gives you peace and that God's peace is sort of the opposite. It sucks up anxiety. Whereas existential psychologists, including many Christian existential psychologists, active Christians, would say anxiety is just literally the consequence of being born a human being. You, unlike a giraffe or a donkey, can think about the future. You can think about your own death. You can think about getting fired from your job. You could think about your loved ones getting cancer. You can conceive of a literally innumerable number of ways that pain and suffering and tragedy might befall you or the people you love or any person in the world. And that such realizations that the world is massive. People disagree about things. I don't know what's going to happen exactly. My choices affect other people and I might make mistakes and how will I bear the like. These are just. That's just what it literally what it means to be human. And then your opportunity with that, you are given the opportunity to respond to that, use it as fuel, figure out what you're here to do and do it and grab life by the horns. That is just a fundamental disagreement at sort of basic principles level about what anxiety is and why we experience it well.

[B]

And also because people assume that the translation is providing them with more or less uninterpreted access to reality. Anytime that you translate an ancient Greek term with a modern English term like anxiety, we have to ask is this really the best fit?

[C]

That's also a good point.

[B]

Yeah. There's problems specifically with this term that is used to translate anxiety. And there's also a demonization of emotions in a lot of biblical counseling. So we talked about there being a really hard mind body split. There is an even stronger mind feeling.

[C]

Split and they'll vary reason drives, emotions are behind, right? Yep.

[B]

Yes. So. Well, there's an assumption that your mind, if you ascent sincerely to right doctrine, is less susceptible to corruption than your feelings. J. Adams, who was the founder of biblical counseling, actually didn't locate feelings in the heart. He knew enough Greek to and Hebrew to locate them differently, but you end up in the same place. And most of the people who are in traditions that embrace biblical counseling have an anti heart construal. So that's. While they'll interpret the heart as deceitful above all things, they won't look at their mind and their cognition and the ways that they might be avoiding dealing with their own garbage or controlling other people with Bible verses. They won't see that as part of the corruption of the heart, which it would have been in that anthropology. There's not that hard split. So there's a sense too that your feelings can always be shut down or overcome or changed just through thought. Which there are practices that can help you meditate on thoughts that can over time change your feelings. You know, our capacity for language emerges from our affect and our socialization. So in other ways, our capacity, I think, is emerging from our body's felt experience of the world as interpreted in our communities. So it's just a messed up model of how people work. And they're taking something that is developing in the 19th and 20th century and throwing it back on to Scripture translated in words that we can hear and that harms people. That can go very badly. So it doesn't give you a sense of how might my feelings change. And there's a lot of ways that feelings can change. But if you can't even ask why your feelings are that way in the first place, you're going to have problems. So this can encourage spiritual bypassing. I get how this happens.

[C]

Yeah. Where we avoid hard feelings by telling ourselves these big claims that are over spiritualized that sort of give us cover to push it under the rug. That's spiritual bypassing.

[B]

Oh. And that is so rewarded in a lot of these communities. And again, it's usually the people with less power in the system that have to pay the price for people avoiding dealing with their. With their baggage. Yeah. Lots of memories of people being given bad advice that are going through my head here. I've given bad advice too.

[C]

Yeah. So I've maybe got one more thing to talk about after this. But this is coming up for me now based on something you said earlier about Adams, who founded Biblical counseling, drawing selectively on early cognitive theory and cognitive CBT foundations. And there's an interesting move there. I hope this isn't too clinical. I'm going to try and make this regular language for everybody. So the idea that the verse here about the heart is deceitful above all things. Right. This is common. You talked about it as one of the Bible facts that gets repeated a lot in these worlds. And that really means that practically what that tends to mean is that the feelings, feelings are deceitful above all things. It does not typically get associated with the mind. So if it's a mind body dualism like you're talking about, it's the body the body and its feelings can be deceitful above all things. And what's interesting is feelings. Speaking from a cognitive theory and cognitive therapy standpoint, feelings cannot be deceitful. Feelings are sort of raw. Feelings are. Well, emotions are raw feelings that are then interpreted through whatever cognitive grid we've got with language that we've learned in the language that we grew up with, or another language that become a second language kind of a thing where we can say, oh, yeah, that's jealousy. Oh, that is anger, that is envy, that is joy. Oh, that feeling is exuberance. Oh, I'm feeling emasculated, Right? So an emotion is a raw feeling that then gets sort of piped through our brains, our mind. And then we find a word and we go, oh, that. That's what that is. We put the word. So feelings, like an emotion, can be misleading, I would say, like, you could have an emotion and you can take the wrong lesson from it, but that's not your heart, that's your mind. And humans do self deceive rampantly. I actually think the Bible is extremely valuable on this point. I think the Bible and other wisdom texts help us recognize how easy it is to deceive ourselves. And they do that through direct teaching as well as stories. And, you know, where we see this happening. People telling themselves what they need to hear, right? To do something that they want to do. But the funny thing about that is that's not feelings. Like, that is literally the mind. Like, if I am telling myself something. So I guess what I'm saying is I wish Adams had taken a bit more of this cognitive theory. He might have saved all of us a lot of trouble to recognize that it's actually the same. I totally agree that the individual person can self deceive to extreme degrees and cause all kinds of suffering and hate and pain and blow up their own life, blow up other people's lives, kill people through self deception, whatever. Right? But it is specifically the mind that does it. And on a very basic cognitive theory, that's the same part of the mind that is interpreting scripture. It reads a thing, it runs it through our cognition, our experiences, what we know, what we've learned, what people have told us, what the people around us believe, and then we interpret it, right? And if there's deception, it's the mind that's doing it. So there is something. I've never picked up on this before, this distinction. I'm curious what you think.

[B]

Yeah. What immediately comes up here is there's a really strong mind emotion split or Mind feeling split. There is an assumption that if I assent to the right doctrine, I can get my mind under control. Part of what will go wrong here is I can assent to something doctrinally, but if you look at my thoughts and my, my thoughts, my responses, what I'm actually doing, I functionally do not believe that thing that I assent to.

[C]

Yeah, the receipts would say otherwise. Kind of a situation like that.

[B]

The receipts would say otherwise. So how do you know that you actually believe something? And what do you do if there's a discrepancy between what you want to believe, what you assent to intellectually is true? And this is a sort of Romans 7 problem. You know, you can assent that the law is good, but there are other forces at work within your members and like, you can't actually follow through.

[C]

I do the things I don't want to do. I don't do the things I want to do. Incredible genius wisdom from Paul. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

So if the explanation for that is just my feelings and I need to shut them down and I need to try harder, well, that's not going to be super helpful for people.

[C]

But it keeps the rest of the system, as you describe it, intact. If that's where we place the onus and that's where the movement has to be.

[B]

Yeah, they want the problem person to stop being problematic or they want, usually women and children to absorb the chaos of men who can't get themselves under control.

[C]

Well, okay, okay, so you're right, but I'm. You're right, but I'm saying it also keeps the sort of, the anthropology, the sort of what is a person view intact. Because if I say, oh, the self deception happens in my mind in the way that I apply this stuff, you know, the raw stuff, I apply it, I make meaning myself. If we admit that, then we have to ask a bunch of other questions about the whole system and, well, what is truth and how confident am I? Because now we're doing cognitive stuff and we have to wall that off if we want simple knowledge and Bible facts.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, in the Old Testament, the anthropology is cardiocentric. You know, your heart is the place where you do your thinking. To a certain extent, you're feeling, you know, your guts can be involved in that. And when you get to the New Testament, particularly in Paul, you're dealing with Jews who have been interpreting the Septuagint to a certain extent through Greco Roman models of philosophy and medicine. So when Paul is talking about the heart in Romans, you know, this looks like a more sorry I'm going to go down a historical level.

[C]

I was going to say I'm sensing you going philo. And although I appreciate it, I don't think we can do that today.

[B]

It's going to be off course. For people who have been very damaged by biblical counseling, it can be helpful for them to know that this is a cardiocentric model of the mind in Romans 1. So it's not just your feelings have led you astray. There is disorder and deception in all of your thinking and feelings.

[C]

When I say I wish that James had taken more cognitive theory, I mean, I wish that in his formulation of biblical counseling, he had been more attuned to what Aaron Beck was recognizing about how people work. But St. Paul is not doing. He's not using modern cognition versus feelings and emotion and nervous system. And he's not. He doesn't know those things. Like he. He's talking about the core of a person. Right. Like the core. And where we would place the core of a person today is much more in their mind. If we're trying to be careful, we would do your whole body, which includes your mind as sort of the command center, but also includes your feelings. And that's like a more nuanced view. That's actually probably more like what Paul was saying, sort of the whole. The center of the whole person. So he was not saying the heart's deceitful, but your mind's totally good, free and clear. That's not what Paul was saying. And so it is weird that he gets interpreted that way now.

[B]

Yeah, well, the hardest deceitful is in Jeremiah.

[C]

Oh, sorry.

[B]

Yeah. But because Paul uses heart language, we translate cardia as heart. He uses it pretty frequently. People will read back these 19th and 20th century anthropologies onto Scripture. And if you can't own that you're interpreting scripture or interpreting scripture rightly is really easy, and you are part of the community that does it. Right. You can't challenge some of these unhelpful pastoral care practices that people are deriving from Paul.

[C]

You know, I have a lot of criticisms of biblical counseling, but this is. I think in some ways this is better, like we said earlier, because an app like this is not going to carry the same weight for someone who's struggling. So when it is unhelpful, they will probably be. Feel more free to disregard it as opposed to all. If they are the type of person who ends up in a biblical counselor's office, that implies much greater depth of sort of connectivity and people in your life and maybe a church body in your life. And so you're going to kind of feel like you need to go with it longer. If people do go with it, though, there's also, as we talked about, there's a buffer there. Those biblical counselors have some soft skills. Hopefully they are just in the room with you. They might have some curiosity. I would hope a real person might ask follow up questions about rumination, follow up questions about being triggered. They might at least. And so that's just a real problem here, is that this kind of approach, while nifty and I did appreciate the reflection section, like, you know, it's just not basically in almost any case of someone using this who's having something that is really seriously bothering them, I would not want them going to this. I would want them doing something else.

[B]

Well, and if your belief is that this is the biblical way to solve all of your problems and it's not working for you, whether you're dealing with an app or you're dealing with a biblical counselor, this is going to be really harmful because how is that going to affect you? If you are trying hard to do everything that people say should work? If you have exhausted the resources of God, how bad are you? Yeah, you must be really bad.

[C]

Oh, well, the good news is we don't have to go to biblical counselors. This was an exercise and hopefully listeners of this show don't need to be told anything like that. I think it's pretty clear if you listen to any number of episodes. But I'll tell you this, I was glad to have you here for this. Heather, thank you so much for joining me.

[B]

Thank you, Dan. Always so good to see you.

[C]

I'm so glad that as this was putting me in mind of you that you were willing to come on and then what additional kismet that you'd be like, oh, by the way, biblical counseling. You probably told me this back then, but it was years ago now and I haven't re listened to that episode in a long time. You probably said it, but that, oh yeah, Biblical counseling is where I came up with that rubric. How perfect is that? I had forgotten about that part.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I was in a community where this was the only acceptable form of counseling.

[C]

Yeah, geez. Well, I'm glad you're out of that now. So.

[B]

Yeah, there were some nice people.

[C]

Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah.

[B]

They weren't, they weren't bad people, but there were people who did a lot of harm in times when they didn't understand the limitations of this model.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, thanks so much, and thanks, everybody, for listening. Peace.

[B]

Take care.

[C]

Sa.