Discerning types of integration on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Dale Johnson, and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified

Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions to the problems that people

face.

This week on the podcast, I have with me Marshall Adkins.

He serves as assistant professor of biblical counseling at Midwestern Baptist Theological

Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri.

And he's also an ACBC certified counselor.

He's married to Rachel, and they have three children.

Marshall, it's such a pleasure to have you with me here at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. It's good to have you here on the podcast today, brother. Thanks, Dale. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Now, we're going to talk today about integration, and we're going to talk about it in a very particular way. Most people, when they hear integration, sort of think one monolithic style, but that's actually a faulty way of thinking about integration, whether we're talking about the secular world or we're talking about the Christian attempt to do integration.

There are lots of different types and styles. I would say that it's on a spectrum of distinctions and differences in the ways in which integrationists approach knowledge and information

and technique and methodology and so on. So I want to start by acknowledging what we're talking

about is on a spectrum. I think we're going to clarify that as we work through this. And let's start

by just asking what is Christian integration and how is that different from biblical counseling in the way that we

think about that? Yeah, the first thing maybe we could step back and see is that integration

is not only being done by Christians. So oftentimes, you know, we're thinking about and talking

about Christian integration as biblical counselors and engaging with Christian integration.

But integration is a more broad project than that in secular field because the search for

a single theory, a school of thought, whether it's a personality theory or a theory of

abnormal psychology or a psychotherapy, there really is not a consensus that can be found

in the secular literature. And there's not really an expectation that a consensus will be found.

There's not an optimism around finding that single unifying theory.

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