138 - Pastoral Care and Hermeneutics

Pastoral Care and Hermeneutics
By Donald Capps
Theology and Pastoral Care Series, Don S. Browning, editor, Fortress,
1984. 127 pp. $5.95.

Students and teachers of pastoral theology and pastoral care theory who have been searching for a fresh and challenging approach to their task that moves beyond the preoccupation with psychotherapeutics that has dominated the field in recent years will welcome this short, packed volume. The book should likewise be of interest to teachers and students of ministry theory in a more general sense, since its focus is upon pastoral actions and their interpretation. This is the stuff of which

140 - Pastoral Care and Hermeneutics

Doctor of Ministry programs are made: a theory for critical use in reflection upon the concrete operations of ministry. Said another way, this is a book about practical theology that makes use of some of the important insights coming from the field of interpretation theory which have so profoundly influenced much of contemporary theology.

Following Paul Ricoeur (whose difficult hermeneutical theory Capps summarizes briefly but with clarity in the first chapter), the author proposes that pastoral actions can be "read" or interpreted as texts. Pastoral actions disclose a world-a world as interpreted in action by the pastoral action. A pastoral action, therefore, must be understood by (1) identifying the basic dynamic of the action; (2) making a diagnostic assessment of the action; and (3) determining whether and in what ways the action is disclosive of the world intended in the action.

So brief a text must of necessity leave a number of issues unacknowledged or unattended. From the perspective of this reviewer, the appropriate beginning point in usefully employing the hermeneutical tradition theory of interpretation is probably not with pastoral actions, but with the actions and interpretations of experience of those who are the subjects of pastoral care, namely, the ordinary folk in the churches. Good pastoral care begins with good perception of what is going on in the situations in which care is needed. Such perception always involves interpretation and a hermeneutic of interpretation, a language by which to understand "what is going on here." To begin the process of interpretation with interpretation of pastoral actions thus seems to skip over a prior and crucial consideration.

All that aside, Donald Capps has given pastoral care some important and exciting new tools. They are tools that are already integral to the whole theological enterprise. May they be used freely and with the discipline that Capps has evidenced in his text.

Charles V. Gerkin
Candler School of Theology
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia