“Jay Adams even cited a swami favorably!” For years, I’ve been intrigued by David Powlison’s statement that Jay Adams “even cited a swami favorably!” I wondered, “Where was that citation?” I found it in a footnote in The Christian Counselor’s Manual. Then I found more footnotes—ten in all. In them Jay Adams cited a swami Hindu psychologist, a best-selling self-help author who mocks people of faith, an unbelieving neuropsychiatrist, three secular body language “experts,” and a humanistic psychiatry professor. Adams’s footnotes raise important questions that extend well beyond Adams himself. What might the father of modern nouthetic counseling teach today’s biblical counselors about reading, evaluating, being informed by, and engaging with secular sources? If Adams could critically engage secular sources without believing that he was surrendering the authority and sufficiency of Scripture, then what might today’s biblical counselors learn from his example?

If Adams could critically engage, evaluate, and selectively appropriate counseling insights from a Hindu psychologist while maintaining his commitment to the sufficiency of Scripture, what might his example teach us about how biblical counselors engage with extra-biblical sources today?