Images of Pastoral Care

Classic Readings

Robert C Dykstra

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780827216266
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

This book is an edited volume of works that have predominated over the past several decades in contemporary pastoral theology. Through the writings of nineteen leading voices in the history of pastoral care, Dykstra shows how each contributor developed a metaphor for understanding pastoral care. Such metaphors include the solicitous shepherd, the wounded healer, the intimate stranger, the midwife, and other tangible images. Through these works, the reader gains a sense of the varied identities of pastoral care professionals, their struggles for recognition in this often controversial field, and insight into the history of the disciple. Includes readings by: Anton T. Boisen, Alastair V. Campbell, Donald Capps, James E. Dittes, Robert C. Dykstra, Heije Faber, Charles V. Gerkin, Brita L. Gill-Austern, Karen R. Hanson, Seward Hiltner, Margaret Zipse Kornfeld, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Jeanne Stevenson Moessner, Henri J. M. Nouwen, Gaylord Noyce, Paul W. Pruyser, Edward P. Wimberly.

PART ONE

CLASSICAL
IMAGES of CARE

INTRODUCTION

The six essays of this section center on influential images of pastoral care championed by two pioneers of contemporary Protestant pastoral theology. The first three chapters focus and build on Anton Boisen’s image of the living human document, the next three on Seward Hiltner’s metaphor of the solicitous shepherd.

Anton T. Boisen

As noted in the Introduction, Boisen’s convictions concerning the value of directly exposing clergy and seminary students to hospitalized patients, what has since become clinical pastoral education, came to him in mid-life as a patient himself emerging from a terrifying experience of mental illness. Boisen tells this story in chapter 1 of this book, derived from his first book, The Exploration of the Inner World (1936). The book was published some fifteen years after his initial hospitalization and was at one time prominent among texts in the psychology of religion.

Those today who take for granted the presence of chaplains and the routine access to patients afforded ministers in hospitals and other institutional settings may have difficulty imagining the world of the Boston psychiatric hospital that Boisen entered in 1920. He reports that it was unusual even for psychiatrists there to converse with the patients: “The doctors did not believe in talking with patients about their symptoms, which they assumed to be rooted in some as yet undiscovered organic difficulty. The longest time I ever got was fifteen minutes during which the very charming young doctor pointed out that one must not hold the reins too tight in dealing with the sex instinct. Nature, he said, must have its way. It was very clear that he had neither understanding nor interest in the religious aspects of my problem.”¹

During that time, however, Boisen became convinced that his own struggles and those of many of his fellow patients were indeed spiritual ones. He believed that their religious nature necessitated the presence and skilled intervention of ministers willing to explore the “little-known territory” of the patient’s confusing inner world in order to “map [it] out.”² “[My work] propose[s] to examine in the light of my own experience,” he writes, “the experiences of other persons who have been forced off the beaten path of common sense and have traveled through the little-known wilderness of the inner life.”³

Hence for him, every patient has the potential to become a “living human document” to the minister or seminary student. This “document” is as worthy of intensive study and as capable of revealing profound new religious insight as the Bible or any theological textbook or tome.⁴ On Boisen’s release from his first hospitalization, then, he put these convictions into action, beginning a fledgling revolution in education for ministry.

Charles V. Gerkin

In chapter 2, Charles V. Gerkin tells his experience as a young man taking a seminary class taught by one of Boisen’s first students. Boisen himself came to one class session, “a strange man with his twisted face, penetrating eyes, and thumping cane.”⁵ The encounter left its mark, however, for in The Living Human Document (1984), Gerkin seeks to reclaim Boisen’s metaphor for a new generation, considering it from the perspective of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics.

“Pastoral counselors are, more than anything else, listeners to and interpreters of stories.”⁶ The ways we speak of, or “story,” our lives matter, Gerkin says. Individuals seek counseling when their usual ways of speaking, when the narrative flow and “plot” of their lives, become somehow confused, garbled, or otherwise insufficient to provide identity and meaning. Their stories—and their story—instead have come to seem unmanageable or destined for tragedy. They call for a fresh reading and infusion of hope from the counselor.

Gerkin, for many years a professor of pastoral theology at Emory University, points out that, as Boisen insisted, such an interpretation of another’s life situation demands no less integrity, discipline, and nuance than one’s study of meaningful written texts. He writes, “Just as the preacher should not look to proof texts to be twisted into the meaning sought for, so also the individual human text demand[s] a hearing on its own merit.”⁷ The difficulties of so careful a reading of another’s life are compounded by the fact that counselors themselves bring to the encounter a particular set of stories and a life story of their own. These, too, come to bear, often unwittingly, on the narratives of the person seeking care. Gerkin thus argues for a certain humility amid this complexity, whereby counselors should not presume too much in terms of common language or understanding: “[T]o listen to stories with an effort to understand means to listen first as a stranger who does not yet fully know the language, the nuanced meanings of the other as his or her story is being told.”⁸

Gerkin acknowledges that as a young seminarian, he found in the “language of psychotherapy” an exciting means by which to navigate this intricate intermingling of stories in counseling. Psychology was, for him, “both liberating from the stereotypical moralism of the Midwestern conventional piety on which I had been reared and concrete in its attention to the hidden dynamics of behavior…”⁹ Over the years, however, he grew more cautious concerning psychology, yearning rather to reclaim theological language for pastoral tasks, until in 1984 he perceived:

[T]he language world out of which the pastoral counselor shapes his or her perceptions and response to the other person becomes crucial. If that be a language world inhabited by the images of theology and faith, the counselee will be invited into a world shaped by those images. If that be, on the other hand, a language world shaped by the images of secularity, it is into that world that the counselor invites the one seeking help.¹⁰

It is thus to this task of reclamation that he commits himself in this work.

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

In chapter 3, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, a professor of pastoral theology and counseling at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, reinforces, a decade later, Gerkin’s call for pastoral theology to move beyond its early emphases on psychology and the counseling of individuals. Desiring to refashion pastoral theology for an increasingly interconnected world at the turn of a new century, she stresses the delicate interweaving of multiple personal, social, and political strands that comprise every problematic situation and caring act. She seeks to supplant Boisen’s living human document with her image of the living human web. Building on Catherine Keller and informed by other feminist and liberation theologies, Miller-McLemore presses for an arachnidian pastoral theology inspired by a spider’s amazing ability to repair its broken web, “spinning oneness out of many and weaving the one back into the many.”¹¹ Social and communal ties, she claims, have too long been neglected and torn.

As noted earlier, Boisen’s gift was to insist that we, in Miller-McLemore’s words, “hear the voices of the marginalized from within their own contexts.”¹²She maintains, however, that from the start, pastoral theology has emphasized “hearing the voices” in this injunction at the expense of its “marginalized” and “their contexts.” It has conceived of its task too narrowly, as empathic counseling with troubled individuals rather than as care that involves and implicates the wider community. The complexity of the living human web exposes the limitations of this preoccupation with empathy: “Sometimes a person must admit an inability to understand fully the lived reality of the oppressions suffered by another. There may be boundaries beyond which empathy itself cannot go.”¹³

Like Gerkin, Miller-McLemore admits to some ambivalence concerning the diminishing influence of psychology, including feminist psychology, among pastoral theologians. This becomes especially significant given the pervasive, mostly unsupported, and usually unchallenged contempt for psychology often expressed by other theologians, who dismiss it out of hand for its presumed unchecked individualism.¹⁴ Still, she concludes that psychology alone can no longer carry the day for pastoral theology. “In a word, never again will a clinical moment, whether of caring for a woman recovering from hysterectomy or attending to a woman’s spiritual life, be understood on intrapsychic grounds alone. These moments are always and necessarily situated within the interlocking, continually evolving threads of which reality is woven and they can be understood in no other way. Psychology alone cannot understand this web.”¹⁵

Seward Hiltner

Chapter 4 doubles back to the midpoint of the twentieth century, from which Seward Hiltner’s metaphor of the solicitous shepherd anchors a second set of three essays in this section.¹⁶ Hiltner was one of Boisen’s first clinical students and came to prominence as an early theorist of the emerging new discipline of pastoral theology in seminary education.

Drawing from Jesus’ parable in Luke 15 of the shepherd who left the ninety-nine sheep to seek the one that was lost, Hiltner conveys a fierce advocacy—what he calls a shepherding perspective—for individuals and small groups within Christian congregations. To be sure, he acknowledges that other equally essential and more communal perspectives frequently inform one’s theology and practice of ministry, specifically perspectives of communicating the gospel and organizing the fellowship. But in those particular circumstances in which a shepherding perspective comes to bear, the needs of the one take precedence over those of the many.

Just what are such circumstances? Those, Hiltner says, that call especially for healing, or, if healing as such is impossible, for sustaining individuals in need.

He turns to the parable of the good Samaritan in Luke 10 to capture the essence of shepherding. Jesus’ praise for the actions of the Samaritan implies, he argues, “that anything standing in the way of the best possible meeting of need for healing is an offense against God.” The wounded man on the side of the road did not need a “verbal testimony” to faith. No, the sole “testimony called for was healing,” the testimony of “oil, wine, bandages, and an inn” that, finally, only the Samaritan provided. Radically, the Samaritan’s shepherding is in no way “ancillary to something else,” but itself became “the one indispensable way of communicating the gospel.”¹⁷

Hiltner’s reading of the parable suggests something of his own early plea for a contextual theology of care. The parable insists, he says, that “the way in which one testifies to the gospel cannot be determined in advance by the preferences of the testifier. Testimony must be given according to the need and condition, on any particular occasion.”¹⁸

Alastair V. Campbell

In chapter 5, Scottish ethicist Alastair V. Campbell acknowledges the pervasive influence, spanning decades in American pastoral theology, of Hiltner’s understanding of shepherding as “tender and solicitous concern.” Campbell sharply critiques this rendering of the metaphor, however, calling it a “mere cipher” of any actual shepherding depicted in the Bible. He sees it as having been derived instead from the client-centered psychotherapy of Carl Rogers prevalent in Hiltner’s day.¹⁹ Campbell himself advocates instead for a shepherd image that is more intense, self-sacrificing, and, in a word, courageous.

Hiltner’s understanding of the shepherding perspective is too parochial, Campbell charges, excessively tethered to “a minister-dominated approach” to pastoral care and “insulated from theological critique by the nature of its purely practical starting point.” Its “fatal flaw” is that it is, finally, “flat and uninteresting.”²⁰ Campbell urges ministers and lay Christians alike rather to consider the fateful words, actions, and sufferings of Jesus as exemplary for courageous pastoral care.

Despite harsh words for Hiltner’s model, Campbell’s own approach ultimately shares much in common with it. Campbell echoes both Hiltner’s expressed uneasiness with excessive dependence on therapeutic technique in complex situations of need and his consequent call for increasing humility in pastoral care. “[F]ar from giving us a simple paradigm for our caring concern,” Campbell concludes, “the image of the shepherd seems merely to reveal our inadequacies.”²¹

Moreover, Campbell, like Hiltner, also eventually opts for a certain pragmatism in assessing the relative outcome of pastoral interventions. One true test of shepherding, he suggests, is whether those who seek care find greater “rest and health” rather than “some narrowing, overburdening, or destruction of themselves.” Another more sobering test asks whether the intervention has in some way proven costly and dangerous to the shepherd.²²

Jeanne Stevenson Moessner

Finally, in chapter 6, Jeanne Stevenson Moessner, a professor of pastoral care at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas, offers a second critical, though some might say complementary, response to Hiltner’s paradigm.²³ She affirms an early critique by Carroll A. Wise, a contemporary of Hiltner’s, which was later reiterated by Campbell. The critique questioned Hiltner’s subtle hierarchical privileging of shepherd over sheep. Despite this critique, however, Stevenson Moessner, too, like Hiltner, turns for guidance to the parable of the good Samaritan in Luke 10. Her revisionist interpretation shifts the focus from Hiltner’s interest in what the Samaritan did at the side of the road to what he did after that, taking the wounded man to an inn and completing his own journey. These latter two actions of the Samaritan, she argues, lend essential support to a feminist model of pastoral care.

The parable begins, Stevenson Moessner reminds us, with Jesus’ injunction to love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and with all our mind, and our neighbor as ourselves (Lk. 10:27). When a lawyer then challenges Jesus to define neighbor, he responds by telling the parable. Its traditional interpreters, including Hiltner, thus invariably and quite naturally concentrate on the way it depicts love of neighbor and, by extension, of God. But had not Jesus actually said, she asks, that we are to love our neighbors, thereby God, as ourselves? If one neglects this crucial third component in Jesus’ injunction to love, that of self-love, the parable may do more harm than good, especially to women.

Why? Because through the ages, she argues, women have shouldered a disproportionate burden of responsibility for caring for others in need and have often come to think of themselves almost exclusively in terms of their caretaking roles and relationships. They grow uncertain of their own individual uniqueness, becoming diffuse and distracted over time. When the parable serves to further reinforce or intensify women’...