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Counseling a Tool in Cultural Mandate and for Social Inclusion

Glitter Moreño

Asian Theological Seminary

Philo, Psych & Socio: Philosophical, Psychological and Sociological Foundations of Guidance

Prof. Leoncito Silva

10 December 2021
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Counseling a Tool in Cultural Mandate and for Social Inclusion

My current pursuit of an advanced counseling training is built around social inclusion in

education, my long-time advocacy as a rural development worker in Southern Negros

Occidental. In this, my ultimate goal is to be able to develop a counseling framework that I can

use in future community projects that will continue to lobby for social inclusion but will be more

anchored on mental health rather than education. The said counseling framework will be

primarily based on, but not limited to, the Christian Worldview – my worldview, Development

as Freedom – my development philosophy, and Social Inclusion – my advocacy. This paper,

then, is one attempt to present where I am now in my journey towards that goal. But to meet the

specific purposes of the course, Philosophical, Psychological and Sociological Foundations of

Guidance, this written presentation only highlights the worldview that is shaping my counseling

philosophy and shares a little about social inclusion.

The Christian Worldview

Total Truth1

Any Weltanschauung2 will have to address humanity’s most basic questions, “Who am

I?”, “Where did I come from?”, “Why am I here?”, “Why do I suffer?”, and “What happens

when I die?”. The Christian Worldview can answer these, and in fact, the only worldview that

can sufficiently do so according to Abraham Kuyper, one of its most well-known proponents.

Kuyper translated Weltanschauung to “life-system” in English in contrast to James Orr’s “view

of the world”.3 Colson & Pearcey (1999, pp. xi-xii) referred to Kuyper’s famous Stone Lectures

1
Total Truth is the title of Nancy Pearcey’s book published in 2004 that encapsulates her idea of the totality of the
truth found in the Christian Worldview.
2
Introduced by Immanuel Kant. Peter Heslam, in his book, “Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s
Lectures on Calvinism”, noted that the term, used to explain “human thought and action” in German Idealism
became widely accepted as “worldview” in English during the Neo-Kantianism in the 20th century.
3
James Orr helped pave the way for the Christian Worldview when he published his book “The Christian View of
God and the World” in 1893.
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at Princeton University in 1898 to claim that “The entire cosmos can be understood only in

relation to God.”, and that Christianity is a worldview that can describe every area of human

existence. Also, it can stand shoulder to shoulder with other more popular worldviews, if not

above them, in terms of “conceptual precision, rigor in argumentation, technical erudition and in-

depth defense of an original worldview.” (Platinga, 1967, 1990, as cited in Pearcey, 2004).

But one reason why the Christian Worldview is not always included in the list of

worldviews in the study of Metaphysics is the Christians’ tendency to privatize their faith. We

have built a thick and tall wall between what we think is private and what we think is public, or

what we think is sectarian and what we think is secular, effectively creating a duality in our

perspective of the human being and the world.

For instance, there is always that caution in the Christian counseling circle to avoid

“spiritualizing” or “over-spiritualizing” when dealing with a client. It is, on the one hand, a

legitimate reminder, if it encourages the Christian counselor to not resort to a spiritual

“prescription” that is, at times, more of a manifestation of professional incompetence than being

“Christianly” but instead to work hard in listening and analyzing the situation to employ an

approach that best matches the client’s needs. But, on the other hand, such caution can also be a

sign of this private-public dichotomy that has been so ingrained in a Christian mindset where a

Christian is not expected to apply the Christian Worldview in executing a professional task, i.e.,

counseling, that is considered within the public sphere. Because in the public sphere, “Reason” is

the guiding force in meaning-making. But reason is already more of a product of a belief system,

and indeed, it is not irreconcilable with value, i.e., spiritual beliefs.

The upshot is that no system of thought is a product purely of Reason – because Reason

is not a repository of infallible, religiously autonomous truths as Descartes and other

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rationalists thought. Instead, it is simply a human capacity, the ability to reason from

premises. The important question, then, is what a person accepts as ultimate premises for

they shape everything that follows. (Pearcey, 2004, p.41)

The above argument is consistent with Kuyper’s thinking that “worldviews have a

determinative effect on the results of scholarship” (Heslam, 1998, p.78), and with the efforts of

Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven, and Cornelius Van Til, whose works attempted to prove that reason

was not autonomous (Heslam, 1998).

Moreover, the said duality in Christians is exactly the phenomenon that lobbyists of the

Christian Worldview, such as John Calvin, James Orr, Francis Schaeffer, Alvin Platinga, Philip

Johnson, Nancy Pearcey, of course, Abraham Kuyper, and so many more, tried and are trying to

debunk. The Christian Worldview is rooted in the reality of who God is and his purposes and

such pervades every phenomenon and every reality in life and in the world, including in the field

of counseling. The fall of humanity is as real within the walls of a church as within the walls of a

counseling room.

Cultural Mandate

One important element in the Christian Weltanschauung is what Pearcey (2004, p.47)

echoes in her scholarship as Cultural Mandate – “to create cultures, build civilizations”, a

directive found in Genesis 1:27-28.4 This concept is within the “Creation-Fall-Redemption”

continuum that explains the origins of life, the fall of humanity, and the redeeming work that

Christians must engage themselves in. God first gave the Cultural Mandate to our

representatives, Adam and Eve, but they fell into sin and consequently, lost their life’s purpose,

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“So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the
earth.”” Gen 1:27-28 (NRSV)
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or at least the purity of their life’s purpose, that is to build a community (culture and civilization)

and to manage the natural resources. But with the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, we regain our

life’s purpose – culture-building – be it in the fields of art, politics, or counseling. Through the

Christian Worldview, a Christian counsellor can tear down the wall that privatizes his or her faith

so he or she can listen to a client and comfortably analyze the client’s needs as a redeemable

culture. As Thornbury (2021) said, “In broad terms, a worldview that is Christian examines

cultural data and locates them within a pattern of belief that is consistent with the sacred text of

Scripture, but also with the broader Christian intellectual tradition.”.5

Imago Dei

Also, another critical component in the Christian Worldview is the belief that human

beings are image bearers of God. Howe (1995) particularly ascribes to Theological

Anthropology that places the understanding that God created man and woman in his image to

represent him on earth as the focal point of reference in counseling. God elevated humanity

above all his other creations for a specific purpose – the cultural mandate.

A counselor, then, with a Christian Worldview will not find the need to spiritualize

because he or she does not operate from a dual framework. From the very beginning, he or she

will see the client as more than a sum of his childhood trauma or adult grief. He or she is an

image bearer of God, who just like the rest of the humanity has fallen into sin and as a result, has

compromised his or her culture. The counselor using a Christian Worldview will be able to label

the client’s needs as redeemable culture and will employ the most suitable “redeeming” tools.

Here, the process of counseling is instrumental in carrying out our cultural mandate, with

the counselor and client as the “redeemers of culture” to right the culture (i.e. resolve the client’s

5
This statement is from Gregory Thornbury’s article “What is a Christian Worldview and Why Does it Matter” in
the CSB Worldview Study Bible.
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problems), spontaneously reinforcing the fact that a client is a human being bearing the image of

God and must form, reform or transform into his likeness.

Counseling in a Rural Setting

An understanding that a client is Imago Dei also provides an enlightenment to the client’s

uniqueness. This emphasizes more the need of the Christian counselor to break free from the

bondage of a dual worldview so it will be easier for him or her to employ counseling tools that

are not originally Christian in origin, because, really, God is in everything, including every

product of counseling therapy scholarship, be it Positive Psychology, Psychodynamic,

Behavioral or Humanistic.

In effect, the Christian counselor can be eclectic in the tools that he or she employs to

meet the specific needs of the client as long as every component in that toolkit of eclecticism is

harnessed towards “redeeming the culture” so the client, as the image bearer of God, can

enhance the image of God in himself or herself, and the counselor, too, can obey the cultural

mandate, in the process.

The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), for instance, is one suitable tool for

counseling in a rural setting as per my experience. It is best utilized with contextual theology,

such as Gustavo Gutierrez’s liberation theology, to acknowledge that the local culture (i.e.,

experiences, circumstances, etc.) of the client is a major shaper of the client’s mindset and when

that mindset is negative it leads to a life of agony, which, in turn, leads to unfavorable behavior.

The CBT’s goal is to change the negative mindset to positive or even resilient mindset.

Rural poverty, for instance is unique to a poor client living in a rural area, and CBT can

help the client deal with constant anxiety over food security by strengthening his or her mind to

be able to see things in a non-anxious manner even though his or her poverty is still prevalent.
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“Make every thought captive to Christ”,6 for one, is a very good mental discipline to incorporate

in using CBT for a client burdened with rural poverty.

Lament, too, is an effective tool to use in a rural setting to help clients articulate their

cries of injustice or being in the bondage of poverty. The Bible is rich with various types of

laments, for instance, a dirge, that can be helpful in helping a grieving client.

I, for one, have been integrating the CBT approach in the Soul Care Think program – a

church project that I started in 2018 to teach, mentor, and life coach children and teens from poor

families. I have also just started to conceptualize Lalaw, from the local word “lalaw” that means

both the acts of grieving and mourning, that hopes to normalize and even promote lament in

times of grief.

Conclusion

To conclude, I offer below a brief explanation of what social inclusion is and why

counseling in rural areas is an urgent need in the Philippines. This drives home my advocacy of

“Counseling a Tool in Cultural Mandate and for Social Inclusion”.

Social Inclusion

Development achieved is not development sustained (Human Development Report,

2016), and development to be sustainable should be inclusive (Sustainable Development

Knowledge Platform, 2021). The concept of social inclusion, where no one is left behind in the

access to opportunities for human development and shared prosperity, is seen as a precondition

to the complete eradication of poverty (Sustainable Development Goals 2030), and as an

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“Indeed, we live as human beings, but we do not wage war according to human standards; for the weapons of our
warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every
proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ.” 2
Cor.10:3-5 (NRSV)
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objective as it serves as a tangible indicator that development agenda have been participatory. In

effect, social inclusion is both a means and an end in sustainable development.

Through the Mental Health Act (RA 11036),7 the Philippine government recognizes that

mental health is vital to our development and affirms the right of all Filipinos to mental health

services. It conforms to the vision of SDG3 in the 2030 Development Agenda, “To ensure

healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.”. These include getting access to

sufficient mental health information and intervention. Indeed, RA 11036 ensures that no Filipino

is left behind on this type of health care as the law mandates that mental health services should

be made available down to the barangay level. Yet, such services, including counseling, are

scarce and even nonexistent in rural areas. Hence, the need for social inclusion in mental health

in rural areas in the Philippines.

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An Act Establishing a National Mental Health Policy for the Purpose of Enhancing the Delivery of Integrated
Mental Health Services, Promoting and Protecting the Rights of Persons Utilizing Psychosocial Health Services,
Appropriating Funds Therefor and Other Purposes.
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References

Colson, C., & Pearcey, N. (1999). How Now Shall We Live? Macmillan Publishers.

Heslam, P. (1998). Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism

(New Stiff Wraps. Second Edition) [E-book]. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Howe, L. (1995). The Image of God: A Theology for Pastoral Care and Counseling. Abingdon

Press.

Langley, M. R. (1999, January). Abraham Kuyper: A Christian Worldview. The Orthodox

Presbyterian Church (OPC). Retrieved December 9, 2021, from

https://opc.org/new_horizons/NH99/NH9901d.html

Naugle, D. (2001, February 2). The Lordship of Christ Over the Whole of Life: An Introduction

to the Thought of Abraham Kuyper. Dallas Baptist University (DBU). Retrieved

December 9, 2021, from https://www3.dbu.edu/naugle/pdf/abraham_kuyper.pdf

Orr, J. (2010). Christian View of God and the World - Enhanced Version (1.1 ed.) [E-book].

Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Pearcey, N., & Johnson, P. E. (2004). Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural

Captivity (Study Guide Edition) (Study Guide ed.). Crossway.

Republic Act No. 11036. (2018). The LawPhil Project. Retrieved December 10, 2021, from

https://lawphil.net/statutes/repacts/ra2018/ra_11036_2018.html

Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. (n.d.). Sustainable Development UN. Retrieved

December 10, 2021, from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.html

Thornbury, G. A. (2021, November 12). What is a Christian Worldview and Why Does it

Matter? Olive Tree Blog. Retrieved December 9, 2021, from

https://www.olivetree.com/blog/what-is-a-christian-worldview/
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United Nations Development Programme. (2016). Human Development Report 2016 [E-book].

United Nations Development Programme.