An Orthodox Perspective on Nouthetic Counseling

A Contemporary Sketch of a Traditional Orthodox Motif, Showing the Reconciliation of a Repentant Sinner to God in the Act of Confession

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

What Is Nouthetic Counseling?

Nouthetic Counseling was primarily conceived as a separate discipline from pastoral counseling by Dr. Jay Adams (1929-2020), a Reformed minister who had his initial foundations laid in the divinity program of the Reformed Episcopal Seminary, and who later went on to acquire a PhD in speech from the University of Missouri. Dr. Adam's central claim was that the Scripture was given as a call to repentance, to instruct us how to live, and to rebuke the stubborn, perverse, hard-hearted human condition. Nouthetic counseling sees itself as a form of communication that attempts to conform to the biblical prerogatives to “teach” and “edify” pastorally, based on the Greek word “Noutheteo” (νουθετέω), which is the stern modality that Christ and St. Paul instructed the Church to use in order to instruct, rebuke and build up the faith of brothers and sisters in Christ. In this way, Nouthesis desires to point to Scripture as a whole. Nouthetic involvement requires a rejection of secular categories and patterns of thought. It requires the embrace of frank, open, repentance-oriented talk, which is often thought of as harmful in contemporary psychology because it does not allow for the shifting of blame from the individual to the collective, or to some other formative figure in one's past. Instead, it focuses on the need for personal repentance and reconciliation in the Name of Christ. Nouthetic Counseling's authority is perceived to come from the Scriptures themselves and should be reflected in the holy, consistent living of the counselor.  

While Nouthetic counselors claim that their methods are grounded in love and are employed to purely helpful ends, most contemporary schools of Biblical Counseling see the Nouthetic approach as focusing on an overly negative, confrontational and traumatizing set of practices, relying heavily on shame and guilt, rather than upon the identification of dysfunction and the reinforcing of positive thoughts and habits. The perception within Nouthetic Counseling that inducing stressful reactions is a good thing, and should be embraced and even encouraged, is seen as an extremely harmful presupposition by the larger Psychological community, which tends to focus on managing and defusing stress as a generally advisable approach. Despite the vigorous disagreement between the two different schools of Christian Psychology, both Nouthetic Counseling and Biblical Counseling agree that the point of pastoral counsel is to stop the habitual sins of man’s sinful nature through the application of God’s grace in the biblical call to repentance, confession, restitution, forsaking sin and living in the Power of the Holy Spirit to create permanent lifestyle change. Through this painful process of self-realization and change, one should be able to restructure their life to follow biblical patterns and begin to realize the goal of more Christlike behavior.

There is much that Orthodox pastors and mental health practitioners can appreciate in the Nouthetic Movement, in its desire for internal, biblical and historical consistency, and its recognition that secular mental health is based on an anthropology foreign to the historical church. In light of these similarities, Ancient Christianity offers a solid critique of the underlying methods and categories of Dr. Adams' thesis, correcting the extremes and abuses, and helping to refocus these impulses into a positive inculcation of traditional Christian values and praxis, rather than the reactionary and overly authoritarian communication styles that are generally esteemed within Reformed and Evangelical circles. In this, we help to approach the standard of the Desert Fathers, which is to avoid reaction, resentment, and self-directed or others-centered hate, and focusing on an inner stillness developed around the practice of constant personal repentance. (1)  

Why Nouthetic Counseling Arose in Post-WWII America

The secularism achieved power through the cultural convergence of Darwin, Marx and Freud's ideologies with an intoxicated industrialism, creating a rebellion against Western Tradition and the Church. Momentum was maintained through heavily propagandizing "science" (most of which has been disproven over the last 70 years). The American and Soviet governments both used this process after WWII in order to justify the breakdown of rural communities, the break-up of families, and the "mechanization of human life". By putting the husband and wife to work and putting the children in public schools, the government moved the locus of human life out of the home for the first time in human history, and both "Socialist" and "Capitalist" systems capitalized upon the labor that this new model made available and controlled the basic formation of the human individual through education. This resulted in a social contract based on simplistic scientism and a vast human pride of place, an ignorance of history and an insistence upon a "chronological exceptionalism”.

The only problem that social engineers had to deal with after their successful dissection of the basic human institution was the mental and physical destabilization and psychological neurosis that such a change created, robbing children of modeled relationships (stable gender roles) and adults of purpose and a sense of accomplishment. This resulted in the "Modern Man", simultaneously sure of the rightness of his cause and emotionally empty despite his pride. This is where the redefinition of human nature and psychological issues came into play, and Freud was used to reinforce the materialistic/evolutionary view that was being used to exploit the masses, teaching moderns that such a divided psyche was the normal state of affairs. This is also where entertainment left its traditional place as a vehicle for the narratives of a culture, and reinforcement of the traditional roles within a society, and started being diversion for diversion sake, intent upon tearing down and replacing real cultural narratives with patently false and contrived stories.

All of this brought about a grossly unattainable and consumeristic vision of life, the "modern life", that both rejected all of the traditional capacities and roles of the traditional family and also implied necessary globalization and international rule of these "enlightened elites". This is how the West and the world came to be ruled by empty, purposeless people, whose passion, no, vocation, became the deconstruction of meaning for the rest of the world - achieved through government, academia and media (all the positions where one set of people tell another set of people what to do). The purpose of the purposeless became to destroy purpose!

Before the beginning of the Conservative Evangelical cultural backlash against the secular imperialism of Evolutionary Atheism in the 60’s and 70’s, the Mainline and Catholic Churches were internally divided, colonized by ideas from outside of its tradition and biblical framework, and was hemorrhaging from the loss of credibility and authority within a rapidly changing Western culture. Into this gap stepped many of the popular figures of the Evangelical Movement, many from a Reformed perspective, in order to reestablish biblical, historical and philosophical authority within a marginalized and dis-empowered Christian cultural situation. Dr. Jay Adams’ Nouthetic Counseling theory is the product of this context and exhibits some of the best and worst of this movement’s characteristics. (2)

Nouthetic Counseling is an attempt to stand against the secular counseling philosophy that infiltrated Mainline Denominations. It makes a valiant effort to reestablish the boundaries of proper Christian faith and practice, a lifestyle of biblical application and faith that nurtures and protects the family and the church. Unfortunately, the Nouthetic Counseling movement has largely spent its initial cultural vigor, due to rigorous in-fighting on the part of Dr. Adams with Nouthetic Counseling’s Co-founders, John Bettler and David Powlison, and shows the fundamental problems of hermeneutics and defining what “biblical” truly looks like in our contemporary context. (3) While “Competent to Counsel” is full of helpful, practical, biblical advice and anecdotes, it does not attempt a serious “Nouthetic” exegesis, glossing over or skipping these essential issues in an attempt to appeal to the greatest readership - from Nondenominational Evangelicals and Fundamental Baptists to Conservative Presbyterians - but fails to provide a solid hermeneutical philosophy to insure uniformity of interpretation, laying invariable division into the foundations of the Nouthetic movement. “Sola Scriptura” is a powerful principle, and without a clearly biblical understanding of the human condition, the nature of grace, the role of the Trinity, the function of accountability and church discipline, and an understanding of the Christological implications of the counseling context, the task of providing interpretation and order falls upon those with the strongest personalities to debate. This fault makes the field of biblical counseling one of intense, mutual antagonism and competition, rather than of biblical harmony, mutual-submission and Christlike love. 

How Nouthetic Counseling Presents a Vision for the Future of Biblicism in a “Post-Christian” Culture

The positive aspects of “Competent to Counsel” are many. The desire to apply Scripture to life and to formulate a means of Christian communication around repentance is invaluable. There are many places where Dr. Adam’s use of scripture and focus on the process of change through sanctification meshes brilliantly with Christian experience from the first centuries, and reveals a universal perspective that is not “Reformed”, but merely “biblical”. Adams’ rejection of secular humanism, and the confidence that authority and priority whereby he has declared the church to be central in helping Christians to live godly lives, is extremely important and must be continued by students of biblical counseling today! Jettisoning the wrong philosophies of Freud, Jung, Rogers, Sullivan, Honey, Skinner and the countless other schools and styles of explaining the mind in evolutionary paradigms, rejecting Creation, the worship-orientation of man’s purpose, and the concept of personal responsibility. (4)

Inculcating personal responsibility makes it possible for people to respond to the message of the Gospel. It becomes possible to form a biblical worldview and to have an effective church with adequate accountability and the mechanism of church discipline through Adams’ “rediscovery” of the practical and biblical parameters for “rebuke” and “instruction” in the practice of nouthetic exhortation. (5) He points out that the entire secularist, politically liberal, Socialist and otherwise anti-tradition/anti-Christian cultural narrative depends on manipulating people and culture through the media’s projection of injustice, oppression, and the necessity of rebellion through a narrative of victimization. This narrative is a script of excuses, deflecting the problems of irresponsibility, lack of self-control or impulse control, and the “environmentalist” approach to deciding factors in human decision-making. This environmental orientation and explanation for actions is the keystone of the liberal narrative and the reason behind the various leftist governmental plans to take power, control environments through direct regulation, manipulate populations with the mind-control theory of manufactured consent, and to see “socialization” and “education” as the primary tools of the state to form and change the moral consensus, which is then interpreted through precedents and individual judge’s rulings to create a body of ever-changing law that has no reference within revelation or natural law, but depends upon the force of the mandating state government. Those of Dr. Adams’ generation say that all of these insidious cultural processes were and are still based upon an analogy with biological evolution through secular psychology, and is an attempt to forcefully upend the structure of the Christianized and morally-socialized (trained through modeling and example) conscience. Psychology is the justification for these practices and for the complete restructuring of the western traditional lifestyle, and all absolutely require a negation of the principle of individual responsibility. The environment becomes the problem and the government’s job becomes to control the environment, thus making human agency unimportant and the evils of society follow a deterministic formula of poverty, disadvantage and discrimination, and makes the criminal “innocent” and the law-abiding and traditional individual a “criminal”. The upside-down world that we inhabit is the direct result of the secular psychological theory and questioning it or uprooting it means that we must question and reject its basic assumptions about human nature and mankind’s inevitable destiny. We must throw out Freud’s “sexual liberation” as well as Skinner's “evolutionary utopia”, and we must trash Jung’s false spirituality based upon the shared evolutionary history and Rogers' amoral understanding of the reflective conscience. Christians must intentionally and whole-heartedly reject these systems and return to a matrix of truth and life that has been deliberately obscured by the enemies of Christ and His Church!

Why Nouthetic Counseling Cannot be a Reformed Discipline

It is my contention that the fundamental difficulty for Nouthetic Counseling springs from its reliance upon the Reformed position of “Total Depravity” and its denial of human agency, which is reflected in the contradiction between the biblical teachings of human agency and the Calvinist teachings of “Unmediated and Irresistible Sovereignty”. Dr. Jay Adams is a follower of the Abraham Kuyper and Cornelius Van Till school of Dutch Neo-Calvinism and Apologetic Presuppositionalism (5), and his application of theory was inspired by the methods of O. Hobart Mowrer, inspired by the failures of Freudian and Rogerian models, and guided by his practice as a pastor and the needs of his people. Through applying Presuppositional arguments, Dr. Adam’s arrived at a position where counseling could be completely reliant upon the application of the “Sola Scriptura” principle for counseling problems and resolve sin issues through repentance, confession and resolution in godly life. Dr. Adam’s is forthright and makes a clear declaration of his affiliations and doctrinal perspectives in the first section of his remarkable book, “Competent to Counsel”, but he never outlines how his theology, which is Calvinist, lines up with the practical and pastoral implications of his biblical model - and the fundamental stress upon personal responsibility can, and most often has, been undermined by the Reformed position.

The whole point of Scripture’s prophetic voice is to prove that man must take responsibility for his own actions and repent, righting his relationship with a loving Creator who does not wish to damn or destroy, “for He does not will that any should parish, but that all should come to a knowledge of the truth” (7), but who cannot save without the consent of the human will (8) - the image of God submitting to the willed “likeness” of God - unification of image and action to the original purpose of mankind - and that action of submission being to “stop”, “cease” and to “die to self”, so that it is “no longer I, but Christ” and “to live is Christ, to die is gain.” (9) Dr. Adam’s recognizes that human action, repentance, is central to the process of becoming whole and sanctified. He recognizes how important it is that humans take responsibility for their actions. (10) But, then, he tries to push a “Reformed” position that so emphasizes the “Sovereignty of God” that it loses sight of the fundamental theological reality of human agency and God’s decision to work through the cooperation of human agency. What many today forget about the Radical Reformation was that it was centered upon a desire to remove the mediation of Grace and the dependence upon the institutional church that caused the Calvinists to declare the famous TULIP… Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints. 

While each of these Reformed doctrinal topics may be found within Scripture, they all occur in dynamic tension of counterbalancing, biblical truths. Man’s depravity is balanced by the broken, but still present, Image of God in human nature, and man’s ability to recognize good in the midst of his inability to accomplish it on his own. Election is balanced by the fact that it is the Church (“Ecclesia”, means “the Called”(11)) that is called by God and predestined to salvation as His Bride, not individuals, and that the call to salvation is universal. Atonement is clearly and biblically “for the sins of the whole world”, and is therefore not “limited” in any sense. (12) And, ultimately, Grace is not irresistible, because there is a sin that cannot be forgiven, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, whose role in the world is to call all to salvation in Jesus Christ. (13)

Calvinism was founded upon the desire to completely remove the mediation of the institutional Church, monergistically insisting that the history of salvation is merely an outworking of God’s will, not dependent upon human submission or cooperation, yet Dr. Adam’s then insists that God’s Grace is mediated by the pastor, the Church, the study of the Bible and the biblical sacraments. (14) While firmly rebuking the contradictions of “Christian Psychology”, this contradiction runs to the very heart of his argument. As a Calvinist, he should realize that the healthy or unhealthy mentalities of various Christians has more to do with God’s will for their good or evil than it has with their personal decisions. Instead, he argues for a “biblical perspective”, which he takes to run contiguously with the Reformed position, while encouraging exhortation, rebuke, confession, repentance, life change, and ultimately, the exercise of human will to receive and practice the Truths of God’s Word, which is the same as receiving God’s grace, but which, if grace were irresistible, would not only be redundant but also unnecessary. Dr. Adams requires the exertion of will, the desire for change and striving against sin, in order for Nouthetic Counseling to work, without holding a consistent Calvinist line that all of man’s strivings are illusion, because one can only accomplish the will of God, who ultimately decides salvation or damnation based upon factors that have nothing to do with you, “ordaining some to salvation and others to damnation according to His sovereign will.” (15)

The Augustinian assertion of “Total Depravity” does not mesh with a practical view of truth and its application to life, contradicting his “marred image” view of fallen man. A “totally depraved” human condition would be completely deprived of the image of God. It would not be injured or marred, but would not exist, and this would preclude counseling both the unconverted and also making Christian counseling incomprehensible and incompatible with any other system (and completely consistent with Van Till’s theology of Presuppositionalism) - since one would be focused on making the image of God in the life of the believer both clear and fit, while the other is merely trying to maintain life, activity and a delicate equilibrium of comparison for the “natural man”. Looked at in this way, secular counseling would not be wrong, but exactly what one who is deprived of the image of God would need to do in order to survive. It would be impossible to apply or receive benefit from Christian counseling as an unconverted person, and also impossible to objectively confirm the benefits and successes of such application. The fact that it is declared wrong and that God’s Word is believed to lead to universal health, life and successful relationships shows that, indeed, all men are constrained by its truth and are called and able to respond to its message in the common grace of the Holy Spirit. The truth is that even the unconverted man is able to recognize the good, the truth of the Gospel, just as “devils believe and tremble” (16), even though he may not be able to choose it or live according to it without the presence of the Holy Spirit in his life and the help that He gives. Therefore, the image of God is not destroyed and man is not “totally depraved”. The work of sanctification is a gradual work in which man is transformed by the Grace of the Holy Spirit from one modality of fleshly thinking and acting to another modality of spiritual living, starting from the moment of conversion, submission to Christ as Lord and Savior, and extending throughout life in a clear process of the Holy Spirit’s work of transformation and maturation. 

How Nouthetic Counseling Unnecessarily Reinvents the Wheel

Reformed “blinders” create a situation where Dr. Adam’s could not consider the hermeneutical traditions of the Ancient Church, and instead, requires him to see all biblical truth as literal instead of anagogic. Therefore, he struggles to define his hermeneutic of what must be understood literally, and what can be figuratively and analogically applied to life. He also strains to connect the biblical principles for Nouthetic communication with the Westminster Confession, which is not only unnecessary, but hurtful, since the constructors of the Reformed tradition did not maintain a cohesive church polity or maintain good relationships amongst themselves, splintering into as many different churches as there were strong personalities, showing that the goal of such confessions was not to “speak the truth in love” for the “edification of the body”, but to justify usurping power over one another and creating irreconcilable divisions. This pattern of turmoil, instability and schism has been kept by the Institute of Nouthetic Studies, the International Center for Biblical Counseling, and the International Association of Biblical Counselors.

Because he cannot avail himself to the traditional patterns of the Early Church, Dr. Adam’s focus on maintaining the categories of secular counseling, such as the identity of the Counselor/Counselee is unnecessary and potentially hurtful, especially when the issues of managing a “Counseling Center” are brought up and the potential for simony (the application of God’s free grace in exchange for money) are considered. It is much more preferable to see this process as the absolutely essential process of Discipler/Disciplee, the “Master/Student” relationship that is exemplified by Christ and St. Paul, which is a “long-term, nurturing relationship with proper modeling and positive reinforcement” that has proven to be the characteristic of all successful counseling. (17) This is the main contention of Dr. Adams’ most effective Christian critic, Dr. Martin Bobgan, who argues that “problem centered counseling” is, in itself, a worldly category and must be replaced holistically by a healthy, worshipping and biblically orthodox church community, that proactively instills right values and lifestyles as a preventative to the kinds of spiritual dysfunction characterized by the world. (18)

The history of the Church is filled with examples of biblical counseling. (19) We do not need to look at the psychological “science” to discover the best practices through contrast. Instead, we should thoroughly examine the Early Church and discern how Christianity has dealt with sin, mental illness and demonic possession from the beginning. The Church has always taken counseling seriously. This is not a new need or a practice discovered or defined by Reformed or Evangelical Christianity. 

The First Century Church believed that confession was necessary for communion and interaction within the Church - And took it so seriously that the Didache says that every services would first have the open confession of sins before taking the Lord’s Supper. (20) The Church created forms for confession, repentance, public penance and reconciliation and private disciplines of thought and prayer, which can be seen in the writings of the disciples of the Apostles - Clement, Barnabas, Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus, all mention the confession of sin and the public condemnation of evil behavior as central to the role of the Church. The Early Church believed that the power to fully translate Christ’s forgiveness was given in ordination by the laying on of hands, the “Keys of the Kingdom” to loose and to bind sin (21), and used this to fully explain the reasons the Apostles had special authority to cast out demons and also why James tells the faithful to call for the Presbyters in times of sickness. (22) The First Century Church did not separate the theological truth and the outward sign, commanded by Scripture, or try to rationalize it away as “NOT supernatural”. (23) This lead to obedience to the Old Testament practice of anointing, associating it with the reception of the Holy Spirit, and functioning as an outward place marker of a special ministry or vocation - for all Christians, this vocation was that of being “Little Christs”, being filled with the Spirit and following the ways of the spirit instead of following after the flesh. The anointing of oil was never understood as the blessing of secular medicine, but as a recognition of the work of God and as a “sealing” or that work by outward, communal recognition of what God had called them to do. Christian history is often replete with the realization that some sins, especially murder, homosexuality, etc., required long periods of retraining and retuning, and developed strict, disciplined, prayerful lifestyles to facilitate this process of repentance, growth and restoration, centered around humble work, counseling with spiritual pastors, and the memorization of scripture - and it was called “asceticism”. (24)

Asceticism, far from being the bad thing that it is associated with by later Christian writers, was initially focused upon dealing with these same issues within a pre-industrial, agrarian cultural setting with those who would not otherwise be married. This historical experience should be appreciated and used as a resource, rather than rejected, because many of the forms recommended in Nouthetic Counseling are striving to rediscover what has already been discovered and well applied. The unrealistic expectation of instant relief from sin-patterns and lifestyles that have taken many years to form, and that have been, essentially, hard-wired into the brain, has caused many Christian counseling ministries incredible harm when dealing with tough issues of sin and identity, such as the recent shuttering of Exodus International and the abandonment of the homosexual rehabilitation programs of many Christian ministries. The expectation of dealing with long-term sin problems must be to cease from sin and to enable the process of sanctification in Christ, not the recovery of a “normal” life. Humankind is best and most fulfilled when it experiences the fullness of God’s Presence in life, not necessarily when one has a wife, children and a productive secular job. The calling to marriage in family is good and godly, but not all are called to married life, and the Church must endeavor to support those who, through sin, biological corruption, or personality, are not able to create stable family units. (25) This can be done by imposing stability and proper habits in the practice of faithful service, diligent prayer, and warring against evil passions until death. 

What a Traditionally-Informed Christian Counseling Would Look Like

Man’s frame of reference and our understanding of man must be framed by God’s existence, His revelation to mankind through Holy Scripture, the process of the Gospel’s propagation throughout every generation of the Church, and the natural law that manifests God’s will to all. In the place of secular therapy we must plant churches, seeded throughout the remnants of the western civilization, which reintroduce the traditional patterns of Christian family, education, church and civilization. We must have a new generation of pastors who follow Adams’ example and become true “pastors”, spiritual fathers and guides, unafraid to apply the truths that God has communicated to mankind through the Scriptures, call all to repentance, faith and a life of Communion with God, whereby sanctification and transformation occurs! This was started by a return to the Biblical inheritance of Nouthesis, and I believe it is what Dr. Adam’s envisioned, even if he didn’t see it accomplished in his generation or enter into the fullness of the Orthodox Tradition. Now that Christianity has been culturally marginalized and begins to be persecuted, as it was in the first few centuries, it is up to the faithful to ensure that this vision of biblical counseling does not die, but it passed on to a new generation of truly biblical churches that believe and teach as Christ taught the Apostles. We must endeavor to live the wonderful, strange life of a “peculiar people”, who live in total dedication to their God and live according to His Will!

Footnotes

1) Metropolitan Jonah, "Do Not Resent, Do Not React, Keep Inner Stillness", available at http://www.holycrossoca.org/newslet/0810.html1) 

2) Adams, Jay, “Competent to Counsel”, Zondervan Publishing House, 1970, pgs 11-22

3) Powlison, David, “Competent to Counsel? The History of a Conservative Protestant Anti-Psychiatry Movement”, University of Pennsylvania Doctoral Dissertation, 1996, et al

4) Adams, Jay, “Competent to Counsel”, Zondervan Publishing House, 1970, pgs 1-19

5) Strongs 3560, νουθετέω, “I admonish, warn, counsel, exhort”

6) Adams, Jay, “Competent to Counsel”, Zondervan Publishing House, 1970, pg 21

7) 2 Peter 3:9, blatantly contradicted by Dr. Adams on pg 70, where he says “As a Reformed Christian, the writer believers that counselors must not tell any unsaved counselee that Christ died for them, for they cannot say that. No man knows except Christ himself who are his elect for whom he died.” 

8) Romans 10:9

9) Mat 10:38, Mark 8:34-35, Luke 9:23-24, Luke 14:25-33, John 12:24, Romans 4:5, 6:11-14, 7:4-6, 8:12-13, 12:1-2, Galatians 2:20,5:24, 6:14, Colossians 3:3-7

10) Adams, Jay, “Competent to Counsel”, Zondervan Publishing House, 1970, pgs 5-6, and on pg 73, “Nouthetic counseling in its fullest sense, then, is simply an application of the means of sanctification.”

11) ἐκκλησία - ek, "out from and to" and kaléō, "to call" – properly, people called out from the world and to God, the outcome being the Church (the mystical body of Christ). Strongs 1577.

12) 1 John 2:2

13) Matthew 12:31

14) Adams, Jay, “Competent to Counsel”, Zondervan Publishing House, 1970, pgs 22-23

15) Calvin, John, “Treatise of the Eternal Predestination of God”, available at https://www.monergism.com/treatise-eternal-predestination-god-john-calvin

16) James 2:19

17) American Psychiatric Association Commission on Psychotherapies. Psychotherapy Research: Methodological and Efficacy Issues. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1982

18) Bobgan, Martin, “Competent to Minister”, 1996, EastGate Publishers, pg 7

19) Allen, Joseph, “The Inner Way: Toward a Rebirth of Christian Spiritual Direction”, 2000, Holy Cross Press, Brookline, Massachusetts, pg 15

20) Didache 14:1

21) Matthew 16:19, James 5:16

22) Dallen, James, “The Reconciling Community: The Rites of Penance”, 1974, Pueblo Books, pg 142

23) Mortimort, A.G., “Prayer for the Sick and Sacramental Anointing”, The Liturgical Press, 1988, pg 122-123

24) ἄσκησις, γυμναζε, the “exercise” that the Apostle Paul connects with striving towards righteousness.

25) Hebrews 13:4, 1 Corinthians 7