Historically, the pastor was concerned with, well, pastoral care. He was the person who shepherded the soul, using the Scripture, sacraments, prayer, confession and absolution, and exhortation. For nineteen centuries the Church often worked faithfully with these tools and saw countless people converted, hungering for God, and living stable lives. Are there failings inherent in such an approach? Ultimately it does not always live up to the desires the pastor might have for those people who are unrepentant of their sin and do not wish to be changed by the power of God
The field of psychology was growing, taking the world by storm, in the early 20th century. In 1925, Anton Boisen, a graduate of Union Seminary in New York, began training seminarians at the Worchester State Hospital, teaching them "Clinical Pastoral Education," in which the pastors would use the tools of psychology to supplement or replace their theological work. This appears to have been an attempt at "relevance" and "care for the whole person." The influence of this movement eventually reached from liberal Protestantism into every major seminary in the country by the 1960s.
Pless makes an interesting comment on p. 97. "Within conservative evangelical denominations there emerged those such as Jay Adams and James Dobson who advocated 'Christian counseling,' hoping to avoid the secular humanism that dominated the social sciences. Nevertheless, they, like their liberal counterparts, cast the gospel in the mold of the therapeutic." This is an intriguing statement to me, as Adams is quite different from Dobson in his theological orientation. Adams set out specifically to divorce himself from the psychological community, though Dobson did not. I'd be especially interested in what any blog readers who are familiar with Adams' work would be able to say about his view of psychology.
In recent years there has been a growing swell of people who reject the psychological model of pastoral care, while there has also been a broad mindset that the pastor either works very much like a psychological counselor or else would freely refer people to a counselor for, as they put it when I was in a fundamentalist Bible college, "situations that need a real professional."
This therapeutic view of the pastoral ministry falls far short of a biblical ideal. It fails to see the power of the Gospel. It fails to see the efficacy of the sacraments. It fails to see how the big picture problem in all our lives is sin and our need for forgiveness and restoration.
Pless draws distinctions between confession, absolution, and exhortation to righteousness and the view that the pastoral counselor will hear your troubles and tell you how to live. In the former view we see a sinner pleading for grace. In the latter view we see a sinner asking how to cope with sin but not necessarly begging for forgiveness. Pless views the pastoral counselor model as inadequate. It erodes the view that sin is powerful and that Christ's forgiveness is the genuine cure for sin.
2 comments:
I think Pless misses part of the point of good pastoral counseling. A good pastor will point the person to God's grace for forgiveness *and* the power to change, which are both aspects of sanctification. It's wonderful and necessary for a person to repent, but it's also wonderful when through the working of the Holy Spirit a person is changed and grows in godliness. As a new Lutheran I can say fairly, I think, that my impression of many Lutherans is that they are great on the Gospel but they hesitate for some reason to help people see that their power for change~which is something that true Christians long for~is in the Gospel too. And when we fail, which we will, the Gospel is there for our forgiveness. Do we look to the world when we are having a marital issue or trouble with a wayward child, etc.? Or do we look to Scripture? Peter told us that His divine power has given us all things pertaining to life and godliness.
womanofthehouse
I have to agree with you, Womanofthe house. There's something that seems to be unsaid in much of the discussion I've heard about pastors and counselors. If the pastor is doing his job well, if the person in the pew is consistently confronted with both Law and Gospel in its power, there should be relatively little left to do in a counseling session. People come confessing because they are troubled by their situations and because they realize their problems are related to sin, either in their own activities or in those they have to deal with, or both. A person who is confessing sin and is given Scripture passages that speak to that kind of sin and which encourage righteousness and assurance of forgiveness will receive all he needs. If the person is genuinely repentant we can expect that he will be receptive of what the Scripture says. Certainly if the penitent comes asking for advice in how to apply the Scripture to the particular life situation, the pastor is to be helpful.
There's an illustration about the way we see Scriptures. Do we have a fat Bible or a thin Bible? Do we see that the Scripture does indeed speak to all our needs (a fat Bible)? Do we think it just has some theological stories and that we need to go to an analyst to find out what our lives are to be like (a thin Bible)?
I pray that all pastors will hear confession and will bring their big fat Bibles to guide people to passages that will give them the kind of hope and help they need.
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