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Pastoral Care and the Unity
of Theological Education
By Thomas C. Oden

"Admittedly all of the major families of disciplines of theological education have at times attempted to accommodate reductionistic historical, scientific, and empirical methods that have in turn attempted to estrange each discrete discipline from the central, integrating spirit of holistic, orthodox Christian theology. All have borrowed methodologies so extensively from the cultural context that they have lost their centers. But no discipline illustrates this more powerfully, dramatically, tragically, and influentially than does pastoral care. "

HOW can pastoral care become more fully integrated into the American theological school curriculum? Within brief compass, I will attempt to (1) sharpen the issue, (2) present a preliminary proposal of a means of recovery of an improved integration, and (3) offer an assessment of potential modes of impact of the reclamation of classical pastoral care upon curricular cohesion and upon the major families of theological disciplines.

I

One discipline in particular lacks full and adequate integration and inclusion in the theological curriculum: pastoral care. Admittedly there is a sense in which all theological disciplines-biblical, historical, theological, church and society, and practical-lack a fully adequate integration. Given the sociology of specialization and the momentum of professionalization in university disciplines, all theological disciplines have been, for fifty or more years, tending centrifugally toward disintegration, but none more so than pastoral care. Pastoral care is a special case among the theological disciplines of a discrete discipline that has preferred to cut out its own distinctive pathway quite apart from biblical, historical, and systematic theological studies. It emerged

Thomas C. Oden is the Henry Anson Butz Professor of Theology and Ethics at Drew University Theological School. His writings include Kerygma and Counseling (1 966) and Intensive Group Experience: The New Pietism (1 972)

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during the period of the hegemony of pragmatic methods and influences in theological education when such independence was thought to be permissible and commendable.

Admittedly all of the major families of disciplines of theological education have at times attempted to accommodate reductionistic historical, scientific and empirical methods that have in turn tended to estrange each discrete discipline from the central, integrating spirit of holistic, orthodox Christian theology. All have borrowed methodologies so extensively from the cultural context that they have lost their centers. But no discipline illustrates this more powerfully, dramatically, tragically, and influentially than does pastoral care.

There is little doubt of the recognized importance, and even popularity, of pastoral care among today's theological students. In many schools they clamor for pastoral care courses, which only two decades ago were considered intellectually unchallenging. Today they are frequently elected by the best students, who are often keenly aware that they need to know how to care for persons in the active ministry that lies ahead of them. The unresolved question is: how adequately is that practice of care to be correlated with Scripture, tradition, theological reasoning, and contemporary cultural challenges (that is, the subject matter of exegetical theology, historical theology, systematic theology, and social ethics)?

Just as the biblical area has been taken captive by reductionist historical methodologies, as many church and society issues have been taken captive by various reductionist sociological methods, as too much systematic theology has become captive to one after another emergent or passing philosophical method, so pastoral care has become almost irretrievably captive and embarrassingly indebted to reductionistic psychological and psychotherapeutic methods. Often these methods, if taken consistently, would rule out the fundament of Christian pastoral care: that God cares for humanity in Jesus Christ.

Our tentative hypothesis on the possible resolution of this problem is this: The reintegration of pastoral care into the theological curriculum depends upon the rediscovery of an integrated method of theological study grounded in the classical pastoral writers. This will require the examination of the historical development of the Christian pastoral tradition, its assumptions and reflection on soul care, and its practice of care through extremely varied periods of cultural challenges.

Scripture and tradition are constantly seeking to make themselves intelligibly understandable to ever new contemporary human experiencing. A primary premise of classical pastoralia is that Scripture and tradition have, by the power of the Spirit, a capacity to reawaken and renew pastoral study and practice. Pastoral care is due in our time for a fundamental reconceptualization in the light of Scripture and tradition. In each period of the Christian pastoral tradition, new challenges have been presented to the practice of pastoral care, yet in our period the dialogue with tradition has become tragically atrophied.

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The care-giving, care-receiving process that pastoral care wishes to embody and practically manifest must now be more fully integrated into scriptural, historical, and systematic theological reasoning, instead of being accountable exclusively to reductionistically-inclined experiential, empiricist, scientific, or pragmatic assumptions. Theological education will not become even relatively unified in our time until the discrete disciplines of the curriculum overcome their tendencies to imperialization and kingdom-building in tiny introverted centers of unshared expertise. Each discipline must now intentionally seek wisdom with and from the other companion disciplines.

The primary problem is not the diversification of disciplines. That is necessary, because the subject matter is diverse. Rather, it is the excessive professionalization of disciplines so as to make them more artificially separable than they rightly ought or need to be, instead of nurturing their mutual complementarity. Rather than continue to reinforce the quarreling sibling rivalries in the family of theological studies, we do better to try to view this family organically, as it was viewed by the classic pastoral writers. Rather than preferring assertive methods borrowed from modern culture which would then seek hegemony over the other theological disciplines, we are at a juncture where our greater need is systemic, empathic, wholistic, integral thinking.

II

How can a more integral way of organizing theological education now be reclaimed so as to positively reconstitute the study of pastoral care? How can pastoral care reclaim its theological moorings?

The surest route into reintegration is the study of the classical pastoral tradition in the periods in which that integration was best formed and still awaits our recollection. For there one can see already achieved a functional integration. Numerous classical pastoral writers, from the Shepherd of Hermas to Jeremy Taylor, provide significant working models of precisely the unity we are seeking, but which we continue to seek desperately and futilely within the context of a fragmented modern consciousness. Among the leading exemplars of cohesively formulated pastoral care in the patristic period alone are these remarkable models of integration: Ignatius, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Athanasius, Nemesius, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Gregory the Great. All of them were profound theological teachers. All were pastors. All were biblical scholars and commentators. Ambrose wrote detailed studies of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and David. Nemesius is among the foremost examples of such biblical-theological-pastoral integration, grossly neglected today. Augustine and Chrysostom left extensive commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms, Gospels and Epistles, as well as homilies, and letters of pastoral counsel. Ambrose and Gregory are probably the leading patristic examples of the integration of Scripture and tradition with the practical tasks of pastoral

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care. Among medieval and reformation writers who best exemplify the integration of pastoral issues with scriptural, historical, systematic, social and practical theological studies, we note particularly: Anselm, Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, Ramon Lull, Luther, Calvin, Menno Simons, Bucer, Taylor, Baxter, and Wesley. They long ago achieved and embodied this profound integration for which we are still seeking.

It is a part of the illusion of modernity, the pride and arrogance and pretense of modern consciousness, that, after all these centuries of social wisdom and soul-care experimentation, it has been abruptly assumed that we must now wipe the slate clean and deliberately learn nothing from this experience. Modernity teaches us that we must on our own discover autonomously and de novo, through our own individual experimentation and without benefit of historical memory, the rudiments of pastoral-theological integration. Yet we need not proceed as if the integration were ours to invent from nothing. Rather, we have available to us a functional integration that has centuries of social experience woven into the fabric of its making, which we can either attend to or ignore.

We are speaking primarily of a long period of pastoral caring from the first to the sixth century, from Polycarp to Gregory the Great. In these six remarkable centuries, three under persecution and three under the post-Constantinian aegis, the great pastoral models did in fact often manifest, under varied historical challenges, that integration of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience in the providing of pastoral care. So we do not now have to go out recklessly into the desperations of modernity to seek a conceptually new intellectual formation or theoretical construct for pastoral-theological integration. Rather, we must look at what is already there. We need nothing more or less than to permit orthodox pastoral teaching to be attentively, obediently, and imaginatively read, inwardly heard, and creatively reappropriated.

The modern seminary has not taken the trouble to look at this yet. Modern pastoral writers with few exceptions have assiduously ignored it, seemingly having decided systematically in advance that it is not worth sustained interest. Rather, they have already so committed themselves almost irretrievably to the assumptions of modernity (which are already in the process of an awesomely rapid disintegration) that they often cannot plausibly imagine that an alternative to modern consciousness even exists. Thus we have not seen what should have been nearest to hand: that there is already a working synthesis available to us in the great integrative pastoral models, especially of the first six centuries.

Many theological students today, and regrettably most of their professors, do not even know the name of Nemesius of Emesa; much less have they read his brilliant classic statement of Christian psychology and therapy. Nor have they read Chrysostom on the priesthood or Gregory of Nazianzus on the principle of seasonable counsel. It is

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unlikely that most persons teaching today in pastoral care even have a copy in their libraries of the greatest single treatise in the history of pastoral care, namely, Gregory's Liber regula pastoralis.

How is this skewed trajectory to be corrected and redirected? First, we must get beyond the prejudice of modern chauvinism, which assumes that any view that has not already sold out lock, stock, and barrel to the assumptions of modernity is already prima facie discredited and "outmoded." The chief disintegrating influence in theological education today, which prevents us from achieving the unity we seek, is modern chauvinism, with its simple, bigoted assumption that pre-modern consciousness is inferior and modern consciousness is uniformly superior to all pre-modern thinkers. A more hopeful and realistic view (already sketched in Agenda for Theology) is a concerted, historically funded, post-modern challenge to modernity, which inwardly knows that the prevailing assumptions of modernity have failed miserably and repeatedly. We are getting many clear signals that we can no longer rely upon these three fundamental, predictable assumptions of modernity: reductive naturalism, narcissistic hedonism, and autonomous individualism. These ideological influences have decisively shaped what is called pastoral care in our time. We are not going to get out of this predicament until we gain the courage to call modern chauvinism to account, and turn anew to the great pastoral models. First we must read them. That is half the battle. But they have not been read, or even published in adequate translations, in many cases, during the past century.

III

Let us take as an hypothesis that such an emergent study were to occur (as I believe it is already beginning to) and were to gain some ground in one or two decades of American theological scholarship. Suppose we do invest ourselves in reassessing the great pastoral models, especially of the first six centuries. What sort of result would that have for pastoral care as a discipline, and for theological education as a curriculum in search of a center? Students would continue to read leading pastoral writers like Clinebell, Scharfenberg, Homans, Erikson, Berne, Rogers, Freud, Skinner, Wolpe, et al., but these writings would be held in tension with and balanced by Cyprian, Ambrose, Thomas, Luther, Calvin, et al.

To focus the question of impact, let us suppose that everyone in a given M.Div. program had read only two classical pastoral works, Gregory's Pastoral Rule and Baxter's The Reformed Pastor, but had at least taken these two inimitable classics seriously. A part of what they would instantly grasp through encountering these great pastoral models is the absurdity, or at least dubiousness, of our modern way of bifurcating and segmenting disciplines safely apart from one another, distributing disciplinary tasks into disrelated strips of beleaguered territory that must each be valiantly defended by means of their

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separatedly borrowed modern methodologies, each with its own burden of indebtedness. That segmentation was not occurring so flagrantly during the time classical pastoral writers were at work, and they worked against the excessive specialization of theological education. Students would begin to grasp a more integrative insight: that if one is going to be a pastor, to provide good counsel to persons in trouble, and to prepare for a significant ministry of interpersonal dialogue and pastoral care, then one must be well-grounded in the practical and pastoral wisdom of the Jewish and Christian scriptures as they have been understood in various pre-modern settings. That does not imply or deny that one need or must know in detail the arguments of the source theories or oral transmission hypotheses or speculations on the history of the transmission of the tradition. It does require the risk of letting oneself be concretely addressed by the Spirit through the language, metaphors, and living power of Scripture itself, and tradition's memory of it, as one moves through situation after situation of pastoral encounter.

Students in pastoral care beholding the great pastoral models would begin to see that the pastoral listening process is not something invented by Anton Boisen in 1925 with the beginning of the CPE movement, but that the caring for others as Christ has cared for us is an intrinsic part of the church's ministry from its very beginnings. Students would have a chance to learn that the church throughout each one of these cultural transmutations has struggled imaginatively to understand what the mediation of Christ's care means, and how it can be embodied, appropriated, and improved in ever-new historical circumstances.

Let us suppose that pastoral care did, in fact, begin seriously to undergo this kind of methodological and classical disciplinary reformulation. What potential impact would that have on the other theological disciplines?

(1)It could influence biblical studies profoundly. The person who is studying pastoral care and taking seriously the issues of pastoral care from the vantage point of the great classical pastoral models is going to be hungering for vital biblical wisdom and perspective. Some relatively neglected portions of Scripture are likely to be re-addressed with deeper concern as a result of pastoral initiatives: Leviticus, Nehemiah, Proverbs, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and above all the New Testament writings that were so decisively formative for classical pastoral care: the General and Pastoral Epistles. These later parts of the developing New Testament tradition, as many New Testament scholars would admit, have been too long ignored under the influence of Weiss, Bultmann, Conzelmann, Käsemann, and others who tend to hold the Pauline strain of the New Testament to be normative for everything else in the New Testament, and view the catholicizing direction of the pastorals to be a gross deterioration of an earlier eschatologically-charged tradition. The past century of New Testament scholarship has on the whole assigned a

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pitiably low priority to the General and Pastoral Epistles. This suggests that these neglected writings are due to become the focus of considerable new attention, critical inquiry, and theological-pastoral study.

Biblical study is in an identity crisis today in part because it has become so stickily entangled in an endless syndrome of the objectivizing treatment of Scripture as merely historical report. This often assumes that the modern exegete has the competence to dissect and judge Scripture, as if it were dead and he or she were performing an autopsy, that is, as if the text had no living power of its own to address and reformulate the contemporary human struggle. This hermeneutical mind-set stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from that which has characteristically prevailed among the classical pastoral writers, in which the major concern has been to listen to Scripture as God's own address, and as sufficient and necessary means of salvation. This does not prevent us from trying within modest bounds speculatively to identify layers of redaction and oral traditioning. That is interesting as a problem of historical speculation, but it has had counterproductive effect in some cases for pastoral care and for the communication of pastoral wisdom to people in need. Objectivizing historical study will not advise the pastor who is faced with a person threatening suicide, or with a family caring for one with Alzheimer's disease, or with one who is severely depressed or phobic. All these problems are addressed in the wisdom of Scripture, but one cannot plumb them by superficial historical investigation, but rather by being addressed by God the Spirit who visits us inwardly when we read Scripture.

Judicatories have pungently criticized seminaries for their lack of practical biblical wisdom. It is theologia's Achilles' heel. A renewed grasp of classical pastoral models is likely to have a positive effect upon biblical study, and will require greater integration of the two now-disparate fields of Bible and pastoral care. It will result in a greater effort to correlate Scripture and Christ's here-and-now ministries.

(2)How will the renewed reappropriation of the classical pastoral tradition affect the study of church history and historical theology? There is much in the pastoral tradition that has been ignored, perhaps even systematically ignored, by historians. Leading modern historical theologians have been more likely to focus on methodological, dogmatic, and philosophical issues, but not on pastoral issues. The indices of primary sources, as in The Fathers of the Church, Ancient Christian Writers, and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, for example, include few references to pastoral issues. Yet one finds that these primary sources, such as the council canons, deal with pastoral issues quite often. Yet all that is remembered are the trinitarian and Christological formulations. Chalcedon, for example, dealt with many issues of pastoral authority, succession, territoriality, administration, liturgy, and pastoral care, but it is remembered almost exclusively for its Christological

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formulations. This promising re-appropriation of classical pastoral care may have an invigorating impact upon the study of church history.

Likewise church history promises to contribute significantly to pastoral care. Until recently these two sister disciplines have been long estranged, as if they lived in two different worlds. Yet the caring process has been going on many centuries in ways that can benefit modern pastoral care, if that vitality could be communicated well by church historians, historical theologians, and historians of the liturgy.

(3)How might pastoral care in this hypothesized new phase potentially influence systematic theology? Theology could be brought back more within the range of the study of service to persons. This may serve as a partial corrective for an overly abstract and unnecessarily speculative systematic theology. The doctrines of providence, will, hubris, temptation, and the demonic are due for significant reworking, partly because they have been so neglected. The issues associated with the meaning of suffering will be more courageously tackled when classic pastoral writers are taken seriously. There are no loci in systematic theology wherein theology makes more existential difference to laity than in the questions of suffering, theodicy, and evil. At those points, there is a profound confluence of pastoral care and theology.

(4)The potential influence of pastoral care on church and society issues and social ethics is promising. It has sometimes been prematurely assumed that classical pastoral writers have remained excessively preoccupied with privatization, while church and society and social ethics issues were more boldly concerned with systemic social justice. Yet there is more of a confluence of interests here than is often imagined. One cannot study classical pastoral models without seeing their constant concern for care of the poor, which ordinarily has not been thought to be integral to pastoral care. Hundreds of documents can be introduced to elaborate this point. Yet we have failed to make this connection at all in most seminary curricula. It remains a stark example of the lack of cohesion in the modern theological curriculum. This integration is already in principle there and vitally present as a demonstrable achievement in classical pastoral care. When classical pastoral writers discuss care for the poor, they characteristically ground their judgments in an abundance of biblical metaphors, stories, aphorisms, and chronicles. They are aware of changing historical circumstances and the varieties of historical political patterns. They are aware that rich and poor exist under different political constraints, and have different political options.

Class analysis was not invented in the nineteenth century. The pastoral writers were not politically naive (note particularly Tertullian, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Baxter). The difference between the Diocletian and Constantinian eras is radical, and the church lived

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through them both, being first politically rejected and then accepted. Pastoral care has negotiated both, has known and survived both persecutions, and has experienced exceptional influence upon civil governance. The classical pastoral writers can have a creative influence upon social ethics issues. In addition to analyzing and surviving systems of social oppression, they have devised a personalizing view of the ways in which oppression is experienced inwardly. There is a significant dialogue that has not yet taken place between pastoral care and social ethics, a dialogue we see embryonically in Howard Clinebell, Harvey Siefert, J.H. van den Berg, Thomas Szasz, Herbert Anderson, David Switzer. But it is incomplete. The key texts yet uninvestigated are classical ones on care of the poor. That dialogue is exceptionally promising for the recovery of integration of the theological curriculum.

(5)Modern pastoral care has found its locus in the curriculum in the practical area on the practice ministries. It is usually grouped as one of the several disciplines of pastoral theology, including homiletics, liturgics, church administration, and Christian education. The recovery of classical pastoral models will in fact have a positive influence on the reintegration of all of these disciplines, partly because the classical modelers were themselves all practicing preachers, liturgists, teachers, and administrators.