318. The Birth of the Biblical Counseling Movement
What happens when the church stops trusting herself to help her own people—and hands the job to the therapist's couch instead? In the 1970s, one pastor's book sold a quarter of a million copies by daring to say pastors and elders were still competent to counsel their flocks from Scripture alone. In this first episode of a four-part series, Dr. Jared Poulton joins Jared Luttjeboer and Dr. Alan Strange to trace how the biblical counseling movement was born out of a head-on collision between the rise of secular psychology and the church's calling to shepherd souls—and why the "alphabet soup" of counseling organizations it spawned still shapes what pastors, elders, and even your church library look like today. Whether you've never heard the term "nouthetic counseling" or you've read every Paul Tripp book on the shelf, this episode will change how you see the counsel happening in your own congregation. Next episode: the man behind it all.
27 Aug 2026
317. Calvin Against the Calvinists, And Why the Scholars Got It Wrong
For much of the 20th century, many academic theologians operated on the assumption that Calvin's successors (Beza, the Westminster Divines, the scholastic tradition) had in some ways betrayed him and traded a warm, Christ-centered theology for cold, rationalistic system-building. Then Richard Muller spent decades in the primary sources and found the picture was substantially wrong. In this final episode of What Did Calvin Actually Say?, Jared sits down with Dr. Cornelis Venema to untangle one of Reformed theology's most consequential scholarly debates and to ask what it means to stand at the end of a tradition rather than cherry-picking a moment from it.
20 Aug 2026
316. Calvin and the State: What the Reformer Actually Believed
Every faction in today's church-and-state wars has a Calvin: the Christian nationalist Calvin, the two-kingdoms Calvin, the theonomist Calvin. But what if they're all working with a myth? The real Calvin was a French immigrant with no voting rights, frequently at odds with Geneva's city council, and ultimately exiled from the city. In this episode, host Jared Luttjeboer and Dr. Venema cut through the legends surrounding Geneva to recover Calvin's political theology, and what it might (and might not) have to say to a church that is tearing itself apart over politics.
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