Converging Horizons: Essays in Religion, Psychology, and Caregiving

By Allan Hugh Cole Jr. and Jaco J. Hamman

This collection of essays considers topics in pastoral theology, pastoral care and counseling, pastoral leadership, and social work, and attends to challenges and opportunities pertaining to the support and care of persons in need. Of interest to ministers, chaplains, pastoral counselors, and social workers, these essays focus particularly on human experiences, needs, or concerns that relate to matters of mental health and religious faith or spirituality. Converging Horizons demonstrates approaches to integrative work that draws on multiple fields of theory and practice in service to the goal of providing a range of caregivers with ways to both conceptualize and engage their important work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781630878306

Allan Hugh Cole Jr.

Allan Hugh Cole Jr. is an ordained Presbyterian minister and Nancy Taylor Williamson Professor of Pastoral Care at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He is the coauthor of Losers, Loners, and Rebels: The Spiritual Struggles of Boys, and author of Good Mourning and The Life of Prayer.

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Pastoral Theology

Protestant

Term

The meaning of pastoral theology is imprecise and no single definition is universally accepted, particularly among Protestant traditions. Currently, it is understood principally in three ways that are related but have different emphases: (1) A theology and practice of pastoral care and counseling; (2) An approach to theology concerned with relating Christian faith claims to the broader world, giving particular attention to methods of pastoral reflection and practice; and (3) An academic discipline within theological education that attends to the foci cited in the previous two definitions.

Classical Period

Taken from the Latin pastoralis, meaning of the shepherd, pastoral theology originally described the theology of Christian ministry broadly conceived and designated the work pastors did in ministry. In this sense, all clergy were pastoral theologians and their practices were pastoral theology. In the late sixth century, sensing a need to guide pastoral practices in a more systematic way, Pope Gregory the Great published Liber regulae pastoralis (The Book of Pastoral Rule) (c. 590 CE) (Oden, 1984). This ministry manual, often translated into English as Pastoral Care, was similar in kind to an earlier tract by John Chrysostom entitled On the Priesthood (386 CE) and was concerned with guiding clergy in the care of souls. Gregory’s work gave rise to a body of literature (pastorilia) that increasingly became normative for clergy instruction and development. This literature’s influence and use lasted through the medieval period and Protestant Reformation, the latter marked by such classic works as Martin Bucer’s On the True Cure of Souls (1538) and Richard Baxter’s Reformed Pastor (1656), and in some traditions even into the early twentieth century. Along with naming the tasks and practices of ordained ministry, pastoral theology was frequently the term that designated this body of literature that offered principles and guidelines for ordained ministry and was concerned fundamentally with the personal and vocational formation and training of clergy. Those understandings reigned, more or less, until the Enlightenment, when even more systematic and formal training of clergy increasingly became the norm and theological education began a fragmentation into various areas of specialized study.

Modern Period

Specialization followed the rise and influence of the modern research university in sixteenth-century Europe and was furthered in Protestant theological education by the efforts of Friederich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and his student Karl Immanuel Nitzsch (1787–1868) in early- to mid-nineteenth-century Germany. The research university itself was becoming increasingly specialized. Attempting to secure theology’s place in the university, these two men sought to professionalize theological education. They argued that like law and medicine theological education furthered the common good. Hence, like lawyers and physicians, clergy had to be trained in a specific knowledge base and set of skills, namely, those required for the leadership and practices of ministry. That training is what pastoral theology traditionally provided.

Pastoral theology thus came to describe both the education for and practice of clerical leadership and its tasks in a manner more formal, regularized, and scientific than ministry manuals alone could provide, though the manuals continued to be utilized. The tasks garnering pastoral theology’s attention included pastoral care (poimenics), instruction in the faith (catechetics), applying moral principles to life experiences (casuistry), and, in some circles, preaching (homiletics), though Protestants typically treated preaching separately. Pastoral theology aimed to prepare the minister for attending to the four ancient pastoral functions required for the cure of souls, namely, healing, sustaining, guiding, and reconciling (Clebsch and Jaekle, 1964, 32–66). Rather than being scholarly or intellectual in its focus, however, pastoral theology was explicitly practice oriented. It was grounded in the application to pastoral experience of various rules and techniques derived largely from more abstract theological principles and honed by experienced clergy. Hence, pastoral theology was applied systematic or dogmatic theology. In keeping with classical understandings, it often took the form of hints and directions for how clergy should carry out their duties in various situations while guided by doctrinal standards of the Christian faith and by the wisdom provided in the literature (manuals) of pastoral theology.

Due to the influences of Schleiermacher and Nitzsch, by the mid-nineteenth century some began to describe pastoral theology as a component of practical theology, which along with philosophical and historical theology, named the primary areas or disciplines within theological education or what came to be called the theological encyclopedia. While Schleiermacher and Nitzsch’s influences were strong—practical theology, like pastoral theology, came to have varied meanings (though the former typically included the study of ethics along with many of the functions and tasks of pastoral leadership cited previously).

Schleiermacher is thought by some to have perpetuated the view that practical theology (including its component, pastoral theology) was reducible to applied principles and techniques of ministry, what Edward Farley has termed the clerical paradigm (Farley, 1983, 87), and also that an attempt was made by Nitzsch to correct this way of thinking. However, a close reading of Schleiermacher’s work reveals that he, like Nitzsch, resisted the notion of practical theology as a mere application of theological knowledge of some other type and as being concerned simply with techniques or technical knowledge (Nitzsch, 1847, 33). Both men, in fact, claimed that practical theology was an autonomous theological discipline involving the acquisition and use of the minister’s own inner constitution, or habitus, the truth and purity of a Christian disposition (Schleiermacher, 1990, 114), rules of art as opposed to legalistic directives (Schleiermacher, 1990, 25, 135), and that practical theology required a convergence of all theoretical knowledge of Christianity that is becoming a church in order to establish a methodological consciousness for official practice (Nitzsch, 1847, 34). Hence, though Schleiermacher’s legacy is the clerical paradigm, as Farley suggests, this is not what Schleiermacher envisioned and desired. He and Nitzsch sought to ground how pastors conceptualized their work in ministry, what that work entailed, and how it should be carried out in a manner more methodologically rich and intentional than classical understandings. Even so, this notion of pastoral theology as a part of practical theology, and as concerned merely with the training of clergy in the applied principles and techniques of ministry, prevailed in both Europe and North America, more or less, until the early twentieth century.

Twentieth Century

Throughout much of the twentieth century, European thinking continued to follow largely the clerical paradigm, often substituting the term pastoral studies to denote a focus on the training of, and skills for, pastoral ministry, and appealing largely to the principles of applied theology to describe pastoral theological method. In North America and Great Britain, however, and among a comparatively small group in continental Europe, by the mid-twentieth century pastoral theology tended to be viewed differently: more broadly in some ways and more narrowly in others. In the North American context, due chiefly to the influences of Anton T. Boisen and his student, Seward Hiltner, as well as Wayne E. Oates and David E. Roberts, it broadened to include critical reflection on both theory and practice. No longer was pastoral theology conceived simply as applied dogmatic or systematic theology (theory) on the one hand, or merely as technical proficiency in ministry skills and wisdom (practice) on the other. Pastoral theology now gave much greater significance to the concrete lived experiences brought to pastors and, in Boisen’s case, to chaplains and those serving in institutional ministries, by persons with problems, conflicts, struggles, and needs. Consistent with Schleiermacher and Nitzsch’s visions for practical theology a century earlier, pastoral theology came to include knowledge and perspectives gleaned from theory and practice brought together in an ongoing mutual, critical, dialectical, correlational, and/or hermeneutical relationship. The result was that while theological theory and doctrine might guide and shape pastoral practice and thus pastoral theology, as classical views held, critical reflection upon practice, including the uniqueness of concrete experience, was expected to play a central role in guiding and shaping theory and doctrine. Giving particular attention to pastoral encounters with human needs as the basis for discerning the relationship between the Christian faith and lived experience, pastoral theology in the mid-twentieth century drew increasingly on resources provided by psychology, psychotherapy and related clinical perspectives, other human sciences (anthropology, sociology, critical theory), and hermeneutics. Pastoral theology appropriated critically the various perspectives offered by those disciplines and their perspectives in an attempt to draw conclusions of a theological order from reflection on these observations (Hiltner, 1958, 20).

Simultaneously, however, especially in North America, pastoral theology channeled its broadened critical reflections more narrowly: almost entirely toward pastoral care and counseling. Pastoral theology also became more or less exclusively tied to Protestant liberalism and its principal tenets, and was influenced especially by the work of theologian Paul Tillich. Moreover, moving away from its classical focus on the concerns and practices of ministry more broadly conceived, pastoral theology tended by the mid-twentieth century to limit its concern to experiences like bereavement, difficulties in relationships, crisis intervention, and addictions; to understandings and concerns of identity development, personality, and personhood; and to clinical conditions like depression and anxiety. Hence, pastoral theology’s primary focus became the individual person, those in closest relationship to the individual, and eventually to the various systems, environments, or contexts in which the individual lived and related. Particularly influential figures in the second half of the twentieth century in North America, who are representative of diverse understandings of, approaches to, and foci within pastoral theology, include Don S. Browning, Donald Capps, Howard Clinebell, James E. Dittes, Andrew D. Lester, Nancy J. Ramsay, Carroll Saussy, Charles W. Taylor, and Edward P. Wimberly; and outside North America, Paul Ballard, Alastair Campbell, and Eduard Thurneysen.

Various movements and disciplines closely related to, and often in conversation with, pastoral theology were either born or became more organized during this same period. Each tended, in various ways, to utilize theological and human scientific perspectives or conceptual frameworks for the concerns and tasks of pastoral care and counseling. Four are particularly noteworthy. The first was personalist care and counseling, which grew out of philosophical personalism as embraced especially by professors and students at Boston University, and was represented by Paul E. Johnson and Carroll Wise. It held that the individual person is the primary ontological category and unit of care, which includes the various components and constituents of personality as well as the person’s experiences, struggles, and needs. Wise in particular argued for human experience being the locus of theological experience, meaning theological reflection necessarily has to arise out of life as it is lived. The second was clinical theology, a predominantly British phenomenon represented by Robert Lambourne and Frank Lake. The latter’s belief was that care and counseling are necessarily christocentric, meaning the adult Jesus is the paradigm both of authentic personhood and ideal pastoral care. As the pastoral caregiver or counselor engages in the process of correlating various understandings offered by faith on the one hand and psychology and psychiatry on the other, faith and its precepts remain foundational and thus are the ultimate guide to, and shaper of, care and counseling. The third was the psychology of religion, which remains a vital discipline even though it is often disregarded by theological and religious studies as well as the majority of psychology faculties due to its interdisciplinary methods and its largely critical stance toward both religion and psychology. That is, in applying the theories and methods of psychology, which tend to devalue the role of religion in human experience, precisely to the study of religion and theological beliefs, the psychology of religion simultaneously belongs to and exists apart from the established fields of religion, theology, and psychology. Influential representatives include Capps, Dittes, Paul Pruyser, Diane Jonte-Pace, Ann Belford Ulanov, and the Jesuit W. W. Meissner. The fourth, which also remains a vital movement, is clinical pastoral education (CPE). This began with Boisen’s vision in 1925 and continues to focus on training pastoral caregivers by means of placing them in actual ministry situations in hospitals, prisons, and mental health clinics and having them reflect with peers and supervisors on the experiences. This experience is particularly important is developing critical self-awareness along with a deepening understanding of the caring process itself. The CPE movement has been represented by Richard C. Cabot (also a pioneer in medical social work), Russell Dicks, and, more recently, by Charles E. Hall Jr. and Charles V. Gerkin.

This narrowing of pastoral theology’s focus to pastoral care and counseling, including its related movements and disciplines, paralleled the pattern of increased specialization among theological disciplines that began in the nineteenth century, though the end result was quite different.

Contemporary Developments and Debates

Contemporary pastoral theology continues to be viewed primarily as the theology and practice of pastoral care and counseling, is still informed largely by Protestant liberalism, and is still centered chiefly on both person-in-environment transactions and a concern for concrete and contextual experience. Particularly influential figures, also diverse in their understandings of, approaches to, and foci within pastoral theology, include some mentioned previously as well as David W. Augsburger, Carrie Doehring, Robert C. Dykstra, Nancy J. Gorsuch, and Howard Stone; and outside North America, Philip Culbertson, Valerie M. DeMarinis, Elaine Graham, Stephen Pattison, and Riet Bons-Storm.

However, contemporary pastoral theology has broadened in at least two additional ways. First, due to the influences of Marxist, feminist, and liberationist thought as well as critical social theories, some now conceive of pastoral theology as necessarily attending to more public concerns. Those include the effects that various forms of abuse, oppression, and injustice have on both individual and corporate well-being. Continuing to bring the perspectives of theology and the human sciences into critical relationship through various methods of correlation and hermeneutics, pastoral theology thus envisioned draws heavily on the concept of praxis to underscore the view that once the insights of theory and practice in critical relationship are discovered, one must intentionally take action to enhance the public good in light of those insights. Pastoral theologians Pamela D. Couture, James Newton Poling, Christie Cozad Neuger, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, and Larry Kent Graham are representative of those increasingly interested in how pastoral theological reflection more broadly conceived, pastoral ministry, constructive theology, and particularly pastoral care and counseling are both influenced by and, in turn, may influence not only the private or individual realms of daily life but also the ecclesial and political sectors in ways consistent with Christian precepts.

A second broadening, which is actually a move to reclaim the classical grounding of pastoral theology in theological principles and reflection, is also taking place. Central to this effort is the goal of reducing the predominant role the human sciences and cognate disciplines have had in shaping both the theories and methods of pastoral theology, so that pastoral theology is guided principally by theological precepts and perspectives that shape pastoral reflection and practice with respect to pastoral care and counseling and beyond. This current focus within pastoral theology is represented by yet another diverse group, including Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger and Daniel S. Schipani, who are influenced chiefly by neoorthodox and postliberal theologies, and especially by Karl Barth; Andrew Purves, who is guided by patristic emphases as well as by Reformed orthodoxy; Michael Jinkins, who also works from Barthian and classical Reformed perspectives, and whose approach focuses largely on pastoral leadership and ecclesiology, thus demonstrating kinship with British understandings of pastoral theology; and Leonard M. Hummel, whose work is grounded in particularly Lutheran thought. Still a comparatively small movement, it has a growing set of voices whose final impact on pastoral theology by seeking to re-envision it in more explicitly theological ways remains to be seen.

Roman Catholic

Term

Since Vatican II, the terms pastoral theology and practical theology have been used almost interchangeably among Roman Catholics. Strictly speaking, pastoral theology is an area or focus within the academic discipline of practical theology and attends to what is classically called poimenics or pastoral care. However, pastoral theology is more commonly conceived in broader terms, denoting what poimenics, along with catechetics, religious education, moral theology, and social ethics, liturgics, missiology, and canon law together—that is, practical theology—seeks to provide. According to Karl Rahner, the objective is engaging in theological reflection in order to discern how, in light of both the nature of the church and concrete contextual circumstances, the church (clergy and laypersons) should engage in ministry in both intra- and extraecclesial contexts (Rahner, 1968).

Modern Period to Vatican II

From the late eighteenth century until the completion of Vatican II reforms in 1965, Catholic views of pastoral theology largely paralleled what has been described as occurring in Protestantism during the same era. That is, pastoral theology was concerned with the formal training and practices of clergy and drew heavily on the guidance of pastoralia as well as the collective wisdom and experiences of seasoned clergy within the tradition. Pastoral theology’s attention was given to pastoral care (poimenics), religious instruction, especially for children and converts (catechetics), and to applying moral and ethical principles to life situations (casuistry), as was the case among Protestants. Also included, however, were training in the administration of the seven sacramental rites and numerous liturgies, canon law, and overseeing various transactions of parish life. As was also true in Protestantism, pastoral theology came to be seen essentially as applied theology, often taking the shape of directions for employing techniques of ministry practice derived from dogmatic precepts. Similarly, pastoral theology was focused exclusively on the ordained priesthood, provided little if any place for laypersons’ participation in the church’s ministries, and fostered an insular existence that attended more to parish membership and maintenance than to a mission to provide for broader and more public needs and concerns (Duffy, 1983).

Post Vatican II

Pastoral theology broadened with the Vatican II reforms to include what Karl Rahner describes as a theology of the Church in action and of action in the Church (Rahner, 1968, 25). This has produced several new foci and emphases. First, pastoral theology is not merely applied dogmatics or technical knowledge, but is praxis, the careful scrutiny of dogmatic precepts (theory) in light of concrete, real-life situations. While God is revealed in the church’s doctrines and traditions, so too is God revealed in occasions of tangible ministry taking place in a myriad of contextualized settings both in the church and in the world. This means pastoral theology seeks to understand as richly as possible the current state of affairs and contexts in which the church lives (what Rahner calls ecclesial existentiell) for the purpose of discerning how the Church must actualize itself in the world (Kinast, 1981). In other words, pastoral theology involves reflection on praxis, which then shapes other types of theological reflection, namely fundamental and dogmatic. Both Latin American liberationist thinking, especially that of Gustavo Guitérrez, Clodovis Boff, and Juan L. Segundo, and European political theologies, particularly the work of Johann Baptist Metz, have informed and shaped this change in perspective.

Second, and related, there has been increased attention given to the more public, ecumenical, and even transforming nature of the Christian faith and thus of pastoral theology. In North America, David Tracy has been among the more influential proponents of this view. Third, given the expanded place for the laity in Catholic thinking, no longer is pastoral theology solely the purview of the priesthood. Laypersons too are called to identify and utilize their own gifts for ministry and to contribute to pastoral theology’s reflection and action (Duffy, 1983). Fourth, given its focus on praxis, pastoral theology has enlarged the role of human scientific knowledge and resources in the theological enterprise. Appealing to methods of correlation and various hermeneutical relationships as well as the methods of various critical