Reconstructing Pastoral Theology

A Christological Foundation

Andrew Purves

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781611642223
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

In Pastoral Care in the Classical Tradition, Andrew Purves argued that pastoral care and theology has long ignored Scripture and Christian doctrine, and pastoral practice has become secularized in both method and goal, the fiefdom of psychology and the social sciences. He builds further on this idea here, presenting a christological basis for ministry and pastoral theology.

Part One

Jesus Christ: The Mission Of God

In part one I lay out the basic theological structure for pastoral theology. There are two primary categories. The first is christological, derived in part from Athanasius, in which Jesus Christ is understood to be both the Word and act of God addressing us and the word and act of humankind addressing God. The second is Calvin’s doctrine of our union with Christ. By the work of the Holy Spirit we are joined to Christ’s mission from and to the Father, thereby to share in his ministry. Thus the ministry of God in, through, and as Jesus Christ is the proper foundation for the understanding and practice of ministry. This is not a new idea, but rather the classical teaching of the church. It stands over and against more recent perspectives in pastoral theology that begin with the human experience on its own terms.

Such a recasting of pastoral theology does not fit neatly into a “theology from above,” however. For to ground pastoral theology at all points in the ministry of Jesus Christ as he is attested for us in Scripture is to insist that we approach the subject matter both “from above” insofar as Christ is the incarnation of God (“the word became”), and “from below” insofar as he was truly human (“flesh”). Thus we understand human experience christologically rather than phenomenologically through the social sciences, but it is nevertheless human experience that is apprehended in Christ.

The focus is on God’s ministry, which was and is and ever will be actual, and therefore relevant and appropriate because of what it is. The church’s ministry is a participation in that ministry, not something new of the church’s invention to meet some present need or circumstance, or a vague imitation of Jesus Christ but doomed to failure because we are not messianic. It is not an ideal ministry yet to be made practical; it is the actual ministry of God, rather, that makes our ministries practical, relevant, and appropriate.

Chapter 1

Doctrine and Pastoral Care

Introduction: Ministry Is What God Does

While, loosely speaking, pastoral work is what pastors do, this is true only derivatively. Pastors do what they do because of who God is and what God does. Or more precisely, before it is the church’s ministry all ministry is first of all God’s ministry in, through, and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. In a primary sense, then, pastoral theology is conducted by reflecting on ministry—God’s ministry.¹ The acting subject of pastoral work is not the pastor or the church but Jesus Christ in his coming as God and in his obedience to the will of the Father. Pastoral work has no subject other than Jesus Christ, and no content other than “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3).

Some may view this claim as counterintuitive because we are so used to thinking of pastoral work as the work that pastors do. In fact, ministry today is skill-driven rather than theology-driven, and seems to incorporate little of the dynamically practical nature of theology insofar as it speaks about who God is and what God does. There is, however, no knowledge of a God other than the knowledge of a God who acts in such a way that we can know him; therefore, as we will explore at length, all theology is inherently practical theology, and all church practice is properly understood as sharing in God’s practice. Thus it is only true derivatively that pastoral work is what pastors do. Rather, pastoral theology has to apprehend as its first and highest responsibility the God who acts for us in, through, and as Jesus Christ. The derivative nature of pastoral work is worked out through our union with Christ and through his gracing of the church for ministry in his heavenly session; I attend to this important point of my argument in chapters 4 and 5.

The ministry of the church is, by the Holy Spirit, a sharing in God’s ministry to and for us in, through, and as Jesus Christ. The task at hand, then, is to focus on the profound interrelationship that must obtain between, on the one hand, those truths and realities about God that the church brings to expression through Christian doctrine and, on the other hand, pastoral care. The reason for this focus is basic to the task of pastoral theology: the direct connection between pastoral work and the mission of God, which can be stated as God in and through the gospel of Jesus Christ, active, at work, and involved savingly in human existence. If the meaning of Jesus Christ clothed with his gospel is not understood clearly or is inaccurately or inappropriately developed, pastoral work becomes unhinged from its true ground in the actual ministry of God and inevitably loses its way. The pastoral theologian, then, must give primary attention to understanding God in and as Jesus Christ as the source of life and hope, meaning and value, and everything that should follow from this attention for the church’s ministries of care. The implications of the gospel must be developed and made explicit in order to remind the church that Jesus Christ is the pastor who guides us to streams of living water, who forgives us our sins and saves us, who heals all our hurts, who brings life out of death, and in whom alone we have union and communion with God.

Pastoral theology, then, before it is a theology of what the church or the pastor does, is axiomatically and first of all a theology of the pastoring God, a theology of the living gospel of Jesus Christ. That is why at the end of the introduction I spoke of our task as pastoral dogmatics. Only as pastoral theology engages in this task is it equipped to be a theology also of what the pastor does. As a theology of the pastoring God, pastoral theology is inherently therefore a practical theology, a theology concerned with action, defined and shaped at all points by the acts of God in Christ given in and as the gospel.

In this chapter I offer a general discussion of the relationship between doctrine and pastoral care. This prepares the way for the doctrinally cast chapters that follow on the ministry of God, the twofold ministry of Christ, the meaning of our union with Christ, the ascended Christ’s gracing of the church for ministry, and the relationship between eschatology and pastoral care. But first it is helpful to offer some general introductory remarks on the consequences of the lack of relationship between doctrine and pastoral care.

Because pastoral work today is often only loosely attached, if at all, to the gospel-given understanding of the pastoring God, it tends to have a formal identity through a relationship with an auxiliary discipline. Thus pastoral care is commonly defined in terms of the psychological and contextual processes of caring rather than in terms of a disciplined theological understanding of the gospel. As I have noted, pastoral care becomes pastoral counseling and social work (students and ministers in the vast majority still tend to refer to pastoral care as pastoral counseling), and it is largely therapeutically construed and practiced.²

The questions (once again) are: if its identity is taken from psychology or social work, what then makes pastoral care pastoral or Christian, and what makes pastoral theology theological? Behind these questions lurks the realization that in the prevailing assumptions in pastoral theology we have become the subject. Human autonomy is assumed. God has become existentially dependent on us for the ministry of care. It is no misjudgment to say that this invites in its wake an approach to ministry in which we are cast back upon ourselves because everything is now up to us.

This shift in the church’s understanding and practice of pastoral care is in large part the result of the great turn toward subjectivity that characterized the European Enlightenment. The thinking and experiencing self rather than the acting God in Jesus Christ came to occupy center stage in the formation of the modern pastoral consciousness. For pastoral care this shift meant a steady drift away from the defining connection with the gospel of Jesus Christ as the act of God. The stage was set for the transmutation of pastoral work into a discipline able to respond to the ubiquitous claims of the experiencing self on its own terms. In the United States at least, from the 1920s, pastoral care came to be cast in a psychological and therapeutic, rather than a theological and liturgical, framework. While attempts have been made to think theologically about pastoral work and about the relationship between theology and psychology, these have been made largely on the basis of an a priori, immanent, and panen-theistic view of God that assumes God and humankind are in some kind of relationship of mutuality—a pleasant thought, but one that quite neglects the sovereignty and holiness of the Lord God. There is, in fact, a vigorous anticonfessionalism in much writing on practical theology. The eclipse of doctrine from pastoral theology is bound to happen when by dint of method in theology we begin with ourselves and our experience of being in relationship with God in some oblique but unknowing way, faithful to the end to Enlightenment epistemological proscriptions. As such, we remain indifferent to the salutary pastoral consequences of doctrine.

Another indicator of the shift in the basis for pastoral work today has been the lack of obvious connection between pastoral care and the worship, fellowship, and mission of the church in many of the standard contemporary texts. It has become largely an open question whether there is any serious material connection at the point of ministerial churchly practice between kerygma (proclaiming the gospel) and didache (teaching the gospel), on the one hand, and diakonia (the “serving ministry” of the gospel), on the other. What is pastoral care when it is separated from or only loosely connected to the doctrinal center of Christian faith?

Lost in the turn toward subjectivity is the recognition that the singularly significant theological basis for ministry lies in the unique vicarious priesthood of Jesus Christ, the ministry that he exercises in the flesh of his humanity on our behalf. When we fail to understand ministry through union with Christ as a sharing in the priesthood of Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit, all things are cast back upon us, and every issue depends on the pastor’s ability to work his or her skills successfully. The work of the pastor replaces the work of God. This approach to pastoral care has fueled the publication of skill-related books and programs for clergy, which are not wrong or unhelpful in themselves, but which leave pastoral ministry open to all kinds of muddle stemming from doctrinal disconnectedness and theological incoherence.

The maturing of the modern age has meant an irreversible cosmological revolution in our self-understanding. Premodernity is not a legitimate intellectual option. But neither is it necessary to follow Kant’s proscription and posit an inviolate chasm between faith’s object and faith’s experience. In part the legacy of twentieth-century pastoral care is the continuing need to find ways by which the content of Christian faith (not always the same as theology!) and psychology may be properly related. If in some sense or other the human soul retains a meaning other than the merely metaphysical, pastors have to be psychologists to some extent. Yet even as the psychophilosophical world of the West changes from the subjective certainty of modernity to the epistemological and moral relativism of postmodernity, as it moves from a worldview centered on the experiencing self to one represented by the deconstruction of the self and even of truth itself, the church continues to assert—albeit sometimes hesitantly today—a confessional faith. Christians recite the creeds (in the jargon of today, a “meta-narrative”), and to some extent presumably make sense of them, not bowing fully either to the subjectivist certainty of modernity or to the relativizing pluralism of postmodernity. In plain sight of both, Christians still assert the central confessional affirmation—Christ Jesus is Lord!—and mean by this not just a statement of truth but also a relationship with the living God given to us through the gospel.

Practical Theology, Doctrine, and Pastoral Care

As a broad and inclusive category, practical theology is theology that is concerned with action. Yet the meaning of the term is not obviously cogent, combining as it does the noun theology with the adjective practical.³ Is not theology associated with ideas and arguments that seek to present eternal truths, while the practical tends to be associated with the mundane, “where the rubber hits the road”? The adjective seems to qualify the noun in an odd way. It is precisely this way of thinking, however, that has led theology to be thought of as “pure” and therefore impractical, and “practical theology” to be thought of as the functional, pragmatic end of the curriculum, where the theory of theology gets applied in churchly work. Even if, with Schleiermacher, we think of practical theology as the crown of the theological enterprise, it remains a discipline struggling to develop a theory.

So, in what way does it make sense to speak of practical theology? Practical theology is practical because it is theological: it has to do with God. All theology, all knowledge...