Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism

By Douglas B. Olds

An updating of virtue ethics for modern pastors and the souls they care for, this book proposes innovations for the craft of ministry in the theology of grace--how virtues radiate to tame strife and other destructive behaviors. It presents a comprehensive alternative to the top-down proclamations of "biblical counseling" approaches that try to impart, from an eclectic biblicist lens, cognitive authorities for consequential change. Instead, Christ's bottom-up practice of virtues heals and fulfills by focusing on neighbor first and subordinating the ego's strategic considerations--more graciously spreading God's will in ministry through participatory and experiential knowledge.

Virtuous pastoral ministries integrate the common grace of humanist learning to address the range of the care seeker's contemporary context--her upbringing, struggles, and affiliations. This book presents more the "how" than the "what" of pastoral theology: more how the dance of mutuality and chivalry enters the spiritual flow of healing metaphysical grace than the "what" of right "belief." Even so, pastoral care from the virtue ethical approach inevitably reconsiders "vending machine" theologies, destructive doctrinal boundaries, and context-lite biblicisms.

This presentation introduces how virtue ethics apply to ministry, the household, individual trauma and addictions, and the contemporary political and cultural arena.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666766998

Douglas B. Olds

Douglas B. Olds is an ordained teaching elder and minister of word and sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA) with experience in chaplaincy and publications in the journal Pastoral Psychology. In addition to degrees in ministry, he received the Master of Public Policy with advanced qualifications in classical ethics and political analysis.

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Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care

Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism

Douglas B. Olds

Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care

Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism

Copyright © 2023 Douglas B. Olds. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-6697-4

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04/03/23

Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Overview

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1: Beyond Date Night

Chapter 2: Earth to Heaven and Back Again

Chapter 3: Households

Chapter 4: Grace May Come in a Pill

Chapter 5: Soothing Modernity’s Combative Anxiety

Chapter 6: Taking Hold of the Chaplain’s Robes

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

Appendix IV

Appendix V

Afterword

Bibliography

Overview

This book builds from its identification of the Trinitarian Absolute will to dispense grace. Grace is active and ongoing, the divine will and praxis of creation, providence, and redemption that is life-enabling, life-sustaining, and life-eternalizing. The constructive plan of grace comes from technê—practical experience that activates the biblical witness to the holiness and wisdom of God by means of Christ’s virtues. Rather than realized by schematic or systematized ways of predicting God’s actions from a static and limited biblicist account of the past so to arrive at the being and status of individual assurance, technê is constructive and future-oriented know-how that seeks the neighbor’s flourishing (Becoming at the scale of the local). This book is a chaplaincy-centered account of how virtue spreads shalom in community.

Sanctification is the creature taking on more and more of the attributes of the metaphysical Absolute revealed in Christ. Pastoral care of disciples on the path of sanctification proceeds through the mutual developing of technê—the knowledge of how arrived at through companionable and hospitable dialogue and presence. Pastoral care models and processes toward ever deeper, more practical and applied understanding of how Christ lays the cornerstone of the gentle kingdom in his excellences rather than in epistemic strategies to gain control and compliance.

The thematic center of this book outlines how pastoral caregivers model other-directed, gentling virtues to live in the image of Christ and to guide others toward their own homecoming in this image. The praxis of virtue ethics is introduced and then applied to pastoral care ministries, the household, individual trauma and addictions, and the contemporary political and cultural arenas.

The virtue ethics of pastoral ministry counters Biblicist Counseling approaches that are grounded in vending machine transactional theologies authoritatively proclaimed. Intended to redirect counselee beliefs from the top down—from an expert’s credentialed but limited and idiosyncratic contextualization of Scripture—the field of Biblical Counseling has routinized an eclectic set of principles that eschews much of humanistic learning while adopting some secular practices as common wisdom. By contrast, the companioning witness of pastoral virtues are practices from the bottom up. It dispenses with strategies of authority, admonishment, and social control. Virtue ethics applied to pastoral ministry find practical wisdom in and from the entire witness of the caregiver’s and care seeker’s experiences and contexts. Such ministry companionably and mutually works through the challenges of sanctification and the joys of living in the not-yet while extending the already of Christ’s certain peace (1 Cor 15:28).

A focused theme of this book is to rule out any eternity for metaphysical mud, the grey chameleon syncretisms that, in pursuance of self-assurance, self-security, and self-exaltation, hybridize symbols of shalom’s lighted and clarion path (secure attachment to gracious will reflected ever outward) with pagan agon’s paths of strife, solipsistic contention, hierarchy-seeking, and violence that estranges and deals death.

Interfaith pastoral ministries—especially in the context of post-colonial diversity—become healing by aligning with and practicing grace pressure through virtue ethics.

Acknowledgments

Any wisdom for ministry that I embody and write has been developed relationally. I am blessed by my experience of chaplaincy in hospital, psychiatric, and jail settings. For reasons of privacy, I do not identify my dialogue partners in those settings, but I have deeply incorporated—inhaled and been shaped by—the stories, joys, and challenges of others.

Outside of those settings, I have profound depths of gratitude to friends, all of whom are teachers and ministers, some of whom have institutional affiliations. The prolific and dogged reporter Mark Shaw urged me to finally set aside my extended period of hesitancy to author a book. His wife, Wen-ying Lu, suggested opportunities for publishing. Our mutual mentor Lewis Rambo published my early work in pastoral care and chaplaincy, especially of men and their spiritual challenges.¹

San Francisco Theological Seminary Professors Christopher Ocker, James Noel, Annette Wiessenreider, Eugene Eung-Chun Park, and Elizabeth Liebert affirmed my academic work. Herman Waetjen suggested that I consider writing a book on the hermeneutics of grace. Carol Robb held me to rigorous standards of argumentation and offered helpful comments on this work. Presbyterian Church (USA) colleagues in ordained ministry did the same for me in the standards and practices of ministry: John Anderson, Joanne Whitt, Landon Bogan, Rob McClellan, and Walt Davis. Chaplains Bruce Murphy, Sabine Schmid, and Blake Arnall. Some of the non-ordained ministers who deeply engaged me in love toward conceptual and practical rigor included Herman E. Daly, Pat Carlone, Royce Truex, Peter Anderson, Ronald Vestal, Marita Mayer, and Thomas Kennelly.

Friends who engaged me on my ministry and writing, proposing questions and suggestions that improved my thoughts, included Daggett Harvey, Stan Starr, Marc Verresen, Rex Houlihan, Katherine Heines, Chester Burke, Teresa Roebuck, Patricia Barros, Clark Semmes, Sandra Eccker, and Virginia Vitzthum. My family proffered love and support in addition to suggestive criticism: my mother Suzanne Glassmire Olds, sons Rowan and Evan, brother Todd and his wife Laura, nephews Nicholas and Connor, and niece Julia. And the blessed memory of my father Ray Mortimer Olds, who passed away during my research for this book.

1

. Olds, Dialectical Displacement; Olds, In the Shadow Side of Hope.

List of Abbreviations

ANE Ancient Near East(ern)

BDAG Bauer, Walter, et al. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

ESV English Standard Version, Bible Translation

HALOT Koehler, L., et al. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. 5 vols. Leiden, The Neth.: Brill, 1994–2000.

Inst. Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin

KJV King James Version, Bible Translation

LSJ Liddell, Henry George, et al., eds. A Greek-English Lexicon, with a Supplement. Rev. ed. New York: Clarendon, 1996.

MT Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible

NIV New International Version, Bible Translation

NRSV New Revised Standard Version, Bible Translation

RSV Revised Standard Version, Bible Translation

TDOT Botterweck, G. J., et al., eds. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley et al. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978–2004.

Introduction

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

(Gustave Flaubert)

I will solve my riddle to the music of the harp.

(Psalm 49:4b)

The speech of the mind without its embodiment in loving and charitable action is distant from the fullest realization of trinitarian grace and depth. This book of pastoral theology proposes a theme for any ministry of spiritual care: the dance of chivalry expressed by the gentling virtues (grace pressure, worldly lightness) may be as close to an inerrant expression of embodied dialogue and grace as we can experience. Its dance of presence among equals dispenses with a counseling approach that has an authority deliver pronouncements based on specialized knowledge of a text. Instead, the dance of chivalry is the virtuous and companionable presence of a care facilitator who has laid down her accouterments of fighting battles inside the culture of strife. She has far advanced, scarred, into the secure attachment of shalom. Such an experienced minister is then warranted to come alongside and appropriately and gently engage the care seeker struggling to do the same. The chivalrous chaplain is both a guide and a mantle for reconfiguring the old person for its replacement by the new creation in Christ (2 Cor 5:17).

Virtues are the praxis and rationality of the messianic pioneer. Learning the Christian virtues changes the emotional repertoire of the seeker. This strengthens the commitment of the caregiver to the virtues being extended and modeled. Emotions change with culture. And learning new emotions and virtues—changing cultures—is akin to a dance.¹ Far more than epistemic shifts in knowledge, changing allegiances and performances from the pagan virtus of agon to the Christian virtues that dispense grace and shalom, involves embodied learning (technê)—where humility is pastoral care’s primary methodology. Emotions do not have a universal signature, but vary across cultures, genders, generations, ethnic and racial groups, socioeconomic groups and developmental contexts and stages of life.² This suggests that the emotional inner life cannot be statically analyzed, read on the facial expressions, like that of a still life, but are contextual, vital and kinetic, full bodied, sometimes incommensurable, adaptable and therefore modifiable. Learning the emotional repertoire of a different, peaceful culture, fitting in, Becoming a virtuous person is a dance practiced with others with whom one wants to dance! Like all practices of technê, it resists stasis in peaceable Becoming. More than a commanding megaphone of precepts, the small and welcoming voice and gentle embraces of our divine Creator bring forth transformed human relationships and embodied shalom. Pastoral care is thus a dance of chivalry. Pastoral care both mirrors and gently pushes back on the aggressive and antagonistic emotional and cultural performances of those seeking guidance and change—those who want to dance with us Christians. Even those who are watching (1 Tim 3:2, 7).

Because it concerns the care of souls, all theology is contextual, centered around embodied practices that create sacred spaces of community peace, belonging, and acceptance. The social context of pastoral care is humanism which reveals glimmers (or denials) of theology in a specific, created situation. The humanities understand and portray human conditions in light of grace emerging from chaos—of freedom from hegemony that enslaves. Humanism cannot flourish in a happenstance, purely chance-driven universe. Humanism exposes grace as triumphant, absent, or accommodating a syncretism (blend) with pagan agon’s contention, violence, and strife. Biblical statements are subject to the historical unfolding of the Holy Spirit that interprets and contextualizes humanism’s achievements or errors. They do not stand outside human contexts. Christian civilization is a product of the humanities as well as the Bible and church. This book intends to add a small spark to the recovery of the primacy of grace in cultures seeking to portray the image of God by replacing practices and missions of agon with shalom.³

This book begins with the primary intention to orient pastoral care in the range and embodiment of grace reflected in Christian virtue and humanism. The practice of pastoral care begins with the Bible but recognizes the supplemental, contextual, and diagnostic truth in literature, science, and the arts to bring them into the living fold of caregiving ministry. Christian humanism applies the discerning lens of Christian faith—its practical knowledge of grace that superintends form and progress (technê). It witnesses to all human literary, aesthetic, historical, and scientific claims that identify and advance the mission and spirituality of grace in social and household contexts.

Technê is the knowledge of how that constructs community and thereby reveals to neighbors our participation in the divine Spirit. Others prioritize the conception and application of theology as epistêmê—the knowledge of what. What can be known about God, and how to organize and systematize that knowledge. Unfortunately, cognitive knowledge is too often purposed for strategic objectives that fail to universalize God’s grace. To dispense and radiate grace to neighbor. Instead, the epistemic dominance in doctrinal theologies often serves (non-Christological) identity formation while justifying social arrangements based on hard power, self- and group-interested control, and hierarchy.

Consider that the serpent’s temptation of the first humans in the garden of Eden was for the extension of epistemic knowledge. Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge may have offered the tempting prospect of a shortcut of experience to the achievement of God’s plan to divinize the creature and come into deeper union through the experience of never-dying time. Experience of temporality, biographical growth, and the development of technê may go together and so dispense with strategizing about the merit (or evil) of others as destinations for grace. Unlike the serpent’s beguilement with epistemic knowledge, experiential development of the embodiments of craft lives intimately with the created goodness of time; craft commits to the values of elapsing time. Only with the onset of death does the elapsing of time turn fraught, in anxiety and denial, reordering the preferences for haste and unitary and instantaneous epistemological insight and ideological systems over that of the time-unfolding development of virtues and the construction of enduring communities through technê. Moreover, human philosophies and religion doubtless misinterpret dualistic epistemology as an effect of the fall. The problem of dualism within the metaphysics of grace points to the need to subordinate epistêmê to technê—of Adam to Christ—as this book will repeatedly argue.

Pastoral care applies technê to enter the spiritual flow of grace. At its most Christological, pastoral care is a conduit into that flow by the modeling and extension of virtues. As virtues take over the old man and his vices, especially of egoism, lack of gratitude, strife, and haste, the person slows down and lives into grace’s metaphysical flow. Its gentling, socializing calm. Recognizing the flow of grace actualized in the Spirit provides the technê of assurance that there is a metaphysical character to human existence which we can experience in order to know. Faith seeking understanding must start with practices of grace that serve God and love neighbor. Rather than assurance developed by epistêmê’s endlessly seeking a doctrinal structure to unlock God’s favor—the recurring treatises on the meaning of justification by faith qua belief. Considering that epistemic religion poses the task for us to first just get to the what of our beliefs with the right referents and in the right order so to increase or recover blessings from God’s favor of our beliefs.

In contrast to this epistemic seeking that puts the cart before the horse has been gentled, developing the how of manifesting Christ’s virtues to soothe tensions and strife develops assurance of metaphysical grace by growing into its flow. From thence processes even more knowledge of how. How to focus on the neighbor’s access to grace’s flow.

Pastoral care is mutual—the grace-building engagement of equals. Prioritizing technê in today’s historical moment of epistemic distrust (by doctrinaire tribes, in conspiracies and memes, of expertise) not only serves pastoral practice and ministry that Christ guides toward (as demonstrated by this book’s many Bible references). Prioritizing Christological technê will have the added benefit, as would be expected of ethical craft in metaphysical accord with the ontology of peace, of calming combative anxieties and tribalized resentments. These hold maladaptive and graceless, agonistic epistemologies (cognitive framing and meaning making) reacting to isolating technological change, pervasive and anonymizing automation, and accelerating social developments.

A task for a theology of the Logos is to repristinate the absolute referents of words while taking account of linguistic nominalism (incommensurable, subjective particularity of words, and their cultural accretions). This book will attempt such for chivalry and virtue. In the process, it will seek to decolonize nominalist accretions that call to antagonistic minds images of domination and the kind of paternalized complementarianism that assigns roles according to sex. Instead, this book will propose an eschatological, grace-recovering sense for these words. These words have roles to play in the anthropology of neighborliness within the gospel metaphysics—the metaphysics of grace. In this sense, chivalry involves laying down the accouterments of strife and war to instead adopt the role that works for peace and advances grace. This peace and grace were both protological (in the image of Creation in Gen 1:1–4) and are teleologically working toward the eschaton (the eternal condition of Creation). The kingdom of God is reverting creation to its pre-fallen ontology: beating back swords into plowshares (Isa 2:4; Mic 4:3) inside a teleology of freedom. This process of change is exemplified in pastoral companionship that is structured on chaplaincy. As this book will give examples, far too many Christian ministers take up the title of counselor without adequate training, wisdom, or metaphysical grounding. Moreover, the Bible is not a handbook of counseling. The repristination of the words chivalry and virtue,⁴ the resacralization of pastoral care along the lines of companionship rather than authority, and the redirection of human agency in pastoral praxis toward the technê of chaplaincy make up the thematic center of this book.

In the same spirit, the NT idea of God’s kingdom is recovered as non-controlling and non-hierarchical. Especially in chapter 5, I make clear that dominion is being tragically misinterpreted and realized in many religious circles. Rather, I argue that the divine grant of dominion in the context of the conclusion of Gen 1 is the gentling way of categorizing, taming, and traveling inside nature, so that kingdom has that same gentling, non-hierarchical meaning. The ideal monarch in Deut 17 revealed in Jesus is devoid of the domination sense invested by imperial, coercive, and agonistic societies. Contemporary dominionism misses the metaphysical centrality of grace as it tempts religious nationalists. These attempt to bring forth dominion by climbing cultural and social hierarchies through the controlling, compulsory, but vain tactics of agon. The culmination of a dominating Christendom absent gentling Christology is the pursuit of control over underlings and outsiders. My friend John Anderson proposes the word (spiritual) kindom if kingdom brings up too many traditional, hierarchical, and dominating implications.

The development of human chivalry is the trinitarian metaphysics of grace outworking in the Christian for the salvation of both the individual and the cosmos. Chivalry involves God’s creation engaged with the Logos—the intention and plan to align secondary, created causes with the divine—by the active assent and participation with the Holy Spirit’s will (conatus) to dispense and radiate grace ever outward. This trinitarian process is modeled in Scripture’s imaging of salvation history as a perichoresis—the embodied and economic (earthward) circumincession of disembodied rational knowledge with the actively processing will. This will—the conatus of grace—has God becoming all-in-all in the temporal creation. The circumincession of Logos and Spirit in creation—of plan and will—is the dance of metaphysical grace that the human creature becomes caught up in her becoming adopted into eternity. The rational mind and the voluntary will enter the gracious plan and path of sanctification that is founded in that plan and radiates toward the paths of others through embodiment. That dance meets God and neighbors in the middle (Matt 18:18–20), establishing new centers for eternity, transforming dead space into living place. The ramifying circumincessions of creatures, Logos, and Spirit divinize. They are the active and ethical process of immanence by which the living Christ is becoming all-in-all, the onset of new hypostatic union(s) of Spirit and incarnated beings. The divine circumincession is bringing forth a new creation, with creatures becoming increasingly intimate and familiar with, and accomplished toward, the divine will. At the eschaton, the process will come complete. Until then, this book proposes the teleological development of chivalry and virtue as the touchstones for perichoretic ministries such as pastoral and discipleship spiritual care.

Diligence must be taken not to read the terms creation, plan/intent, or will as modes or distinct properties of the divine essence. For where creation takes place, plan is melded with will, and where divine will operates, life-establishing and life-sustaining intent are inexorable. Each hypostasis of the divine essence is fully integrated as the one God. It is in the temporally-bound human experience of the divine essence that these hypostases (or persons) may seem to dance or process temporally. Strategizing (epistêmê) undergoes reflection conditioned and then advanced by direction and limitation. By way of contrast, free acts of grace (the technê of God’s ḥě·sěḏ: God’s steadfast, creating and providential love) lead human understanding and sanctifying commitment to the metaphysics of grace in which faithfulness progresses toward immanence.⁵ At least that is how I, a creature, have experienced this perichoretic dance of divinity in my Scripture-aided mind and church-taught soul.

Virtue ethics as proposed in this book are directed toward pastoral ministry: the care of souls and the transmission of peace and grace in society. Strategic ethics—consequentialism—has its place in Christian life that pursues holiness. The holiness of God is the special revelation of the Bible, with Christological particulars characterizing both testaments that guide its readers toward holiness in sanctification. Holiness involves the harmonious integration of justice with the practices of dispensing free grace—justice expanding access to grace where it has been humanly denied. Thus, at times the demands of justice may seem to inhibit particular realizations of blessings for their redistribution. Distributive justice is not the primary focus of virtue ethics and the companion-scale practice of pastoral care advanced in this book. But in no way do virtue ethics require quietism or apathy in the presence of injustice.

I will in this book repeatedly distinguish the implications of the classical anthropology of knowledge: technê and epistêmê. τέχνη (technê) is craft, art, skill that focuses on building and change rather than passive theoretical knowledge and appreciation—the practical knowledge of how that spurs to actualization and innovation. As an art, technê dispenses with systems of rules and dogmatic recipes to rely instead on the practitioners’ experience and transferrable (transferred) excellences. It takes delight in selfless excellence that dispenses grace and the construction of beauty rather than in egoism’s seeking of control.

By contrast, ἐπιστήμη (epistêmê) focuses on the ordering operations of the mind, even if expedient (Isa 32:6) or self-justifying. Epistêmê is the disciplined and ordered (delimiting) knowledge of what. Sociopolitically (see chapter 5), epistêmê focuses more on what aggrieves one’s considerations of static absolute values than technê, which is more concerned with the constructive and processive.

This distinction of emphases has led me to join with the tradents in the church who have speculated on the single divine essence encompassed in three hypostases. This metaphysical speculation can only be aided by the active outworking and cultivation of technê and epistêmê, emphasizing the former. This book promotes the practice of pastoral care through other-directed virtues that spread grace and are assembled under the transformed (agon-denying) literary and historical construct known as chivalry. It rejects the hierarchical epistemic focus of Biblical Counseling as an authority for pastoral care.

If the words chivalry and virtue alienate post-Christian sensibilities or signal their colonization by domination cultures, the former may be read in what the French term noblesse absent its aristocratic or political-economic connotations. In Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–35), Rabelais wrote of an ideal nobility,⁶ a monastic order where the voluntary will is considered free (as in the freedom to be left alone). The will is then nobly educated, organized into a force for positive freedom (Gal 5:1; 4:31) that extends service to others (i.e., grace). The foundational principle for such freedom of will is the Spirit, the instinct[ual] . . . goad which always pricks them toward virtuous acts and withdraws them from vice. They called it Honour . . . that noble disposition by which they were, with frankness, striving toward virtue . . . casting off and breaking down that yoke of bondage . . . [by vying] laudably with each other to do what they saw to be pleasing to any one of them. The human will recognized as noble and virtuous consistently chooses the good, the true, and the beautiful, which is Christ. Always chooses to work for shalom.

Virtue may be read as the anodyne lived values. But such a substitution will lack the philological and historical depths and nuances of meaning of the words used in this book, as I hope will be made clear. Virtue is more than decency; it lives actively and positively in the responsibility to promulgate and sustain shalom. While a program of decency might allow for a non-messianic model, a tactful and monastic withdrawal and negative liberty, virtue is positive liberty. Virtue is the outworking of magnanimity—the freedom to actively dispense and extend grace for neighborliness. Chapter 1 provides a more extended discussion of the kindness, courtesy, and benevolence underlying the Christian virtues.

Virtue is the praxis of life lived liturgically and worshipfully inside God’s cosmic will and holy temple. Not necessarily verbal, virtues are deictic illustrations and gestures that orient its practitioner and observers toward admiration and self-control. In virtue is the recognition of Christ’s honor and demonstration of Christ’s excellence. Virtue is the authentic power evangelism. Virtue’s mirroring in community creates collectives of shalom so that ethical recognition becomes its own theological resource in addition to (personal) experience, reason, tradition, and Scripture. Ethics has been a poor stepcousin in theological methods centered on epistemic—fixed and disembodied—rationalisms.

All theology leads to Jesus, and all ethics to recognition of our status as disciples of Jesus. Jesus’ meritorious ministry was gracious and uncompelled. It was free, but it had a purpose. By manifesting the divine conatus in freedom, he honorably and nobly (chivalrously) triumphed over human urges to agon. Jesus is more than epistemic teaching. He is the pattern of virtue and supplication—the freewill offering of grace. Discipleship is individuated technê applied to extending that pattern into new centers of grace taken up into eternity.

The Logos-centering action of the Holy Spirit is involved in the writing, translating, and reading of Scripture; in authorial intent throughout Scripture; and in the cultural significance of various words, phrases, and events. In the Holy Spirit’s conveyance of the Logos, literary, scientific, and artistic meaning-making is a process of social exploration that reveals what ails us. These humanistic pursuits show what is neglected or perfunctory, mean, profane, and degrading. They aid in the caregiver’s resources and training for ministry. They also reveal where imagination is elegantly realized as praxis, assisting the craft and skill (techné) of soul care and virtuous and committed companionship that heals.

We beneficially recognize how others practicing the virtues of Jesus break the cycle of agon’s violence and contention. Virtue is the art of the practical intellect. Virtues serve shalom while allowing a post-performative (post-proclamatory) evangelistic entry to modernity—modernity that is suspicious of metaphysics linked with hypocrisy. By contrast, virtues undergird the architecture of the ever-emerging kingdom of God by operationalizing grace and realizing the Golden Rule. God as an architect may be an underappreciated image. The OT especially is rife with images and instructions for construction, habitation, and measurements.

We may glimpse grace’s architectural outlines in virtuous and transforming communities developing shalom—the secure attachment to peace. Aristotle is a pre-Christian thinker concerned with practical knowledge and architecture’s later link with virtue in his Nicomachean Ethics that builds the polis of flourishing (εὐδαιμονία eudaimonia) citizens:

Since architecture is a technê and is essentially a reasoned state of capacity to make, there is neither any technê that is not such a state nor any such state that is not a techné. Therefore technê is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning. All technê is concerned with coming into being, i.e., with contriving and considering how something may come into being [Becoming] which is capable of either being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made. . . . Making and acting being different, technê must be a matter of making [a category of Becoming], not of acting [a role or performance proposing epistemic or cultural status].⁷

Technê designates the practical means of people and their skills that function at being present, indispensable, and companionable to the tasks of meeting needs and overcoming privation (such as redeeming hierarchies of domination engendered by the structures and artifacts of epistêmê).⁸ The means of technê are communication and virtuous gesture intended to bring about a result which, in case of the chaplaincy care espoused herein, gentles the will to rage and break, transforming materialist agon into spiritual shalom. To restore connection with ontology (peaceful creation) in order to transform, by means of virtue and one person at a time, the social fabric (political networks, technologies, relations with non-human nature, psychocultural motivations) into the eternal kingdom of God. Technê reintegrates—as does the best of humanism—willing, knowing, and aesthetic feeling, leading us toward both the recognition of received grace and its actualization in community.

As will be noted in the opening chapter, it is important to keep in mind that the virtue ethics in Aristotle and the New Testament differ in ends. For the former, the subject is directed to virtue for the attainment of personal goals inside the polis. In contrast, the Christian program for virtue ethics advanced herein is other-directed—the benefits of flourishing are primarily intended to accrue to the neighbor, with ancillary benefits (Beatitudes) to the practitioner in spreading political, cultural, and spiritual shalom.

Sanctification of self and society is the disciple’s goal. It is not effected by the simple proclamation of orthodox doctrines (epistêmê). It involves living salvifically in community, bringing healing, security, and peace to disordered spaces, transforming them into places of shalom. God does not need or desire our violent means to accomplish God’s peace. God has no need of violent wrath or tribal identities to recruit the ignorant to Christ’s gospel.

The focus on virtue praxis is proposed as worshipful and respectful companionship with all who seek fellowship with the Spirit’s ethical processing—God’s becoming all in all. This includes the physical realm. The restoration of all things (Acts 3:21) has been created through and for Christ (Col 1:15–20), so that Christ now fills all things (Eph 4:15–16). This processing is the conatus of metaphysical and persistent grace—God’s חֶסֶד (ḥě·sěḏ) steadfast love, God’s χάρις, charis—that permeates the whole of Creation so to sustain it and bring it new and increasingly flourishing life. The spreading of divine immanence. It is not relegating this eternalizing life to heaven after we die. A pastor is a companion in seeking holiness—an integration and ordering of character and soul to act with grace, justice, and creativity. Through humble and prayerful, companionable ministry may both author and reader—both caregiver and seeker—be coaxed to sow grace through virtue and dispense with material strife that has no place in eternity.

Virtue is the outworking of the metaphysics of grace. Holiness is virtue’s preferential and methodological option for the oppressed. While this book prioritizes pastoral virtue within the conative metaphysics of grace, there are situations where the pursuit of justice and the nonviolent pushback against privilege are warranted and priorities. Holiness is thus a dialectic of discernment when pushback against oppression and deprivation is indicated for those denied the flourishing in universal grace. Virtue ethics is not a quietist program, though it leaves grand strategies of consequential impact to the purview of God. Nor is the program of virtue ethics accepting of a status quo. Virtues spread shalom as it develops personal holiness, adding justice, widening and deepening grace to and within communities

This book is a ministry, not a demonstration of theological mastery, which is continuously developing in this human life. I intend this book to propose the theory and praxis of chaplaincy as a pastoral caregiving theology and ministry with a thick reading of the Bible in contrast to the paradigm, surface readings, and dictums of Biblical Counseling [BC]. Three classes of reader are addressed in this book:

a. Pastoral caregivers and professional ministers.

b. Current and prospective practitioners in or clients of the field of Biblical Counseling who are looking at alternative theologies and practices. They are explicitly addressed throughout, though if they have no interest in politics—especially its progressive view—they may skip or skim chapter 5.

c. Christians looking for a mode of building stakeholder consensus in interfaith partnerships and Christians interested in cultivating virtues and actuating them in ministry to and for others. Some may find chapter 2 and the appendices overly academic.

Chapter 1 begins with a critique of the Biblical Counseling program and introduces the alternative praxis of virtue cultivation for both caregiver and care seeker. The skilled chaplain as pastoral caregiver has developed an appropriate self-mastery and understanding of these virtues for their mirroring and transmitting to others. After introducing the metaphysics of divine conation in grace, chapter 1 concludes with biblical applications for relational pastoral care that involves dialogue and relational processing beyond BC’s nouthetic (admonitory) assignment of isolated verses from Scripture.

Chapter 2 introduces the theology of grace and its hermeneutics (interpretive framework) that escapes the pitfalls of simplistic, transactional, and reciprocal pursuit of benefits. The source of so much of this prosperity gospel that links human performance with material benefits is a misreading of Rom 8:28 and other texts. Chapter 2 engages a comprehensive, necessary unpacking of this faulty prosperity exegesis by applying the hermeneutics of grace.

Chapter 3 discusses the household as the priority arena for the formation of the technê of grace: the equality of male and female, the nonviolent rearing of children, and the practices of economics and leisure all may be considerations when addressing and caring for dysfunction—where grace has been stymied.

Chapter 4 offers a practical focus for ministry and care of those suffering from trauma and addiction.

Chapter 5 extends chapter 3’s introduction of culture and context to the realm of politics, especially how some Christians are increasingly hybridizing (syncretizing) the gospel that announces peace with the aggressive and demented forms of power, authority, and symbols. This chapter is drafted from the perspective of Christian humanism and its technê that chronicles progress. Like the appendices, this chapter was composed to address toxic theological systems of tribalism, syncretism, and domination. Propositional claims, when serving abusive systems, do lead not to healing but actually inflict and spread trauma.

Chapter 6 proposes visions of chaplaincy and how pastoral caregivers and ministers may practice the arts of companionship and transmission of virtue. It suggests further exploration of the chaplain’s task to counter the sins of agon and exemplify the virtues that reveal and transmit shalom.

The appendices are offered as technical applications of the hermeneutic of grace. The bulk of the exegesis underlying the presentation in the preceding chapters is found in the appendices. These present an understanding of conatus and its application to the Trinity (Appendix I) and the way I approach Scripture as an infallible but not inerrant source for theology (Appendix II). Appendix III presents a detailed exegesis of the Blood Atonement as Christus Victor—Christ’s expiation of judgment. Such a conception of the atonement refutes any primary dictum of the substitutionary propitiation of a wrathful and violent God.

Appendix IV is an even more extended exegesis than chapter 3’s of the theo-anthropology of gender relations in the Bible, while Appendix V refutes dispensational premillennialism’s Darbyite claim of a parenthesis in salvation history that postpones the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount to some future millennium. I find that refutation important both to support the ethical proposals in this book and to counter the accelerating political accommodation of professing Christians with political violence and imperial and racial nationalism. One of the themes of this book is that no valorized third-path syncretism of peace and violence, shalom and agon, occurs in the biblical witness. This theme is crucial for pastoral care and harmonizing domestic virtue and deliberative grace in all things.

A note on method: while this book criticizes biblicism as a source of pastoral authority, the reader will see repeated biblical citations to illustrate this book’s points and claims. While it may be objected that this continues the tradition of biblicism, I intend that this presents the Bible as a sufficient and authentic witness to the holiness of God—that elegant and harmonious blend of creative, providential grace and corrective justice, with grace the final word. This witness has the sanctifying end of leading its recipients to pursue and embody holiness. The Bible-guided witness of pastoral companioning dispenses with the epistemic strategies of authority and admonishment with its ends of reordering care seeker behavior from the top down: where Biblical Counseling is precept- rather than virtue-centered.⁹ Instead, the Bible-guided witness and pastoral theology proposed herein is intended to build processive connection and collaboration of Becoming (on earth) rather than a static order and consequence of Being-assurance (toward heaven). By this, the Bible witnesses sufficiently to pastoral technê (virtue’s immanence) far more than to ground leadership through inerrant epistêmê (doctrine’s supposed transcendence).

A note on presentation: all biblical citations refer to the NRSV unless noted otherwise. All Greek citations are from the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece (28th ed.) and Hebrew references from Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Biblical verses and passages are mostly referred to parenthetically rather than fully rendered to cut down on space and avoid what this book argues against: that a citation of Bible passage is enough to confirm a point of argumentation, analysis, or application. The parenthetical citations are meant to stimulate the reader’s reference to the passage, including their responsible exegesis to confirm or argue against the flow and claims of this author’s presentation. Thus, the parenthetical citations of biblical verses and passages indicate the author’s reference to such texts as supporting examples.

As an additional note on terms, I repeatedly employ the Hebrew word shalom to contrast its ideal with the state and pursuit of strife in non-Israelite values (agon). I employ and define this term in a way I think Jesus would have been familiar with. I recognize that some may feel this is a Christian appropriation of Jewish culture. However, as I define and employ the term, I cannot locate a non-Hebrew term with the same semantic range and religious connotation. My apologies for any parochial offense taken though I hope for grace by my readers in this case.

A note on gender: as will be made repeatedly clear in the analysis and illustrations of agon, classically these were masculine tropes of vir-tus. The male pattern was held to be normative so that as females were socialized inside these classical cultures, many struggled. Some males did as well. This book will argue that the alternative is not a more focused or effective socialization of women into the classical male pattern. Rather, the opposite—this book proposes the transformation of male virtus, weaponization of theology, and pedagogical training for the needs of the military into the Christian virtues, disestablishing toxic and antagonistic patterns for a more androgynous and gender-neutral chivalry. In our current culture, this may mean the more intensive retraining and socializing of males to patterns of the gospel Jesus who is the embodied image of positive sociality, never a caricature of weapon-bearing macho. How one responds to the question of gender roles may indicate one’s commitment to classical agon and cultural patterns of virtus as well as receptivity to the transforming nature of Christian virtue.

People may hold epistemic faith like they would a clutch full of sand. You may never want to open your fist to examine your truth, lest the sand that is your faith leak out and you are left with nothing but doubt.

But I might suggest that truth of belief is more like powdered dye. You open your hand to serve technê, and the dye you’ve been clutching indelibly