Last week, thousands of biblical counselors gathered in Fort Worth, Texas, for the annual meeting of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC). I was honored to be a speaker for this event, and First Counseling, the counseling ministry of First Baptist Church, hosted a booth in the exhibitor hall.

Representatives from First Baptist gave away anti-zombie stickers to anyone who visited the booth. We gave away many hundreds of these stickers which were a tremendous hit.

When I returned home from the conference, I received a very kind and thoughtful email from a brother in Christ who, though not at the conference, heard about the stickers, was concerned about them, and encouraged me to address the matter publicly. After thinking carefully about this, I have decided to heed his request.

Stickers articulating zombie opposition might be a curiosity but shouldn’t inspire any real concern. Dislike of zombies ought to be relatively uncontroversial. By the time anyone is concerned about the distribution of zombie stickers, something else is going on.

Moving Beyond Stickers

At issue is not the stickers, but the meaning behind the stickers. That meaning has to do with a significant conflict currently taking place in the contemporary biblical counseling movement. In the last few years, a group of people have been creating a significant disruption in the biblical counseling movement by insisting that faithful biblical counseling requires the syncretization of biblical truth with secular wisdom.

I have referred to this group of people as The New Integrationists. The project of integrating the man-made theories of secular psychology with Scripture is nothing new. Their argument is that integration is “wise, good stewardship, and inevitable.” This is an astonishing claim which overlooks the historical roots of the contemporary biblical counseling movement founded to eliminate the syncretistic project of integration, not perpetuate it.

Earlier this year, I wrote a response to The New Integrationists called Priests in the Garden, Zombies in the Wilderness, and Prophets on the Wall: The Current State of the Contemporary Biblical Counseling Movement. The article was a parable in which I portrayed faithful biblical counselors committed to the sufficiency of Scripture as priests, secular therapists opposed to Christ and his Word as zombies, and The New Integrationists who syncretize Scripture with secular therapy as infected priests.

The article was candid about divisions that exist among Christians committed to counseling. Those on the side of classic biblical counseling and committed to the sufficiency of Scripture loved the article and the anti-zombie stickers that grew from it. Those on the side of counseling syncretism were frustrated by the article and are, by extension, concerned about the stickers advertising opposition to zombies.

Moving Beyond Zombies

It is that article which stands behind the stickers. But something much more significant stands behind that article. That something else is a commitment to biblical thinking. The commitment to biblical thinking is what is at the true center of this controversy. That commitment is unpacked in the book of Ephesians.

Ephesians 2:1-2 describes the state of everyone apart from Christ as “Dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked.” Those words teach that people, apart from Christ, are literally the walking dead.

Based on that foundation, Paul makes a critical demand of believers in Ephesians 4:17-18, “You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart.”

Paul’s words give explicit instructions to Christians about how we are to think. We are commanded to think like people who are alive in Christ, not like the spiritually dead who exist in darkened ignorance.

The colorful metaphor of zombies and infected priests comes not from pop culture or any impulse to divide and provoke. It grows directly out of biblical categories. My burden has been to apply these clear biblical categories of thought to the crucial problem of syncretism in the biblical counseling movement. My belief in the intellectual categories created for us by the Apostle Paul creates an urgent desire to call Christians away from the intellectual infection of thinking like zombies (or, dead people who are lost in sin, if you prefer communicating without the metaphor).

Focusing on What Is Important

We should all be concerned that an entire group of Christian leaders do not understand the kind of syncretism they are advocating is an exercise in thinking that is explicitly opposed to the teaching of the Apostle Paul. Instead of fomenting conflict around a sticker, they should embrace the biblical meaning behind that message and trade in their old, dead ways of thinking for the light, life, and truth in God’s sufficient Word.

For anyone interested in engaging the real issues, I am going to make one more effort at clarity on this matter. Next Tuesday, October 22, I will be in Kansas City speaking at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I will speak at 10:00 in chapel and give a series of For the Church lectures on the conflict in the contemporary biblical counseling movement. These talks will be open and available to the public, and you can find more information about them here.