Jesus Christ and counseling on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association

of Certified Biblical Counselors where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people

face. We are honored this week on the podcast to have as our special guest, Dr. Paige Patterson,

the president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which is an ACBC certified training center

with counseling. Dr. Patterson, it's an honor that you're here,

and I want to ask you, because you have transitioned three programs to be biblical counseling

programs, including the current institution you serve as president, Southwestern. Why are you so committed to biblical counseling?

Thank you, Dr. Lambert, for the opportunity to be with you today, first of all, and thank you

for the superb work that you are doing, and may God bless you and all of your staff in every effort.

The reason I'm so committed to it is that I made a commitment years ago

to the inerrancy and infallibility of God's Word,

and it's a matter of consistency to me.

If I do really believe that God's Word speaks without error

and that it is infallible and will not lead us into failure,

then I have no other alternative except to apply that to every aspect of our school.

When I went Southwestern Seminary, we had an integrated, so-called integrated program. And like all

integrated programs, it was primarily psychology with a religious veneer. And I noted that

very carefully. I had a series of meetings together with my provost, Dr. Blazing. I called them

Educate the President meetings. And we brought all of our counselors together and gave them a period of approximately four years in which to convince me or even provide any evidence, whatever at all, that there was something more that was needed for counseling

than God's word. They never brought me the first indication of it. And so at the end of that,

I did the only thing that I felt was consistent. And we abolished the integrated counseling program,

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