504 - A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization

A History of Pastoral Care in America:
From Salvation to Self-Realization
By E. Brooks Holifield
Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1983. 416 pp. $16.95.

This is not a history of how American pastors have cared for their flock. Instead, it is a history of how pastoral care has been conceptualized or envisioned by our most articulate spokesmen. (I use the word spokesmen advisedly since, except for a few allusions to Helen Flanders Dunbar, the "matriarch" of the Council for Clinical Training in the l940s, this is a book about men's visions of pastoral care.)

Holifield, professor of American church history at Candler School of Theology, sees some continuity in the way pastoral care has been conceptualized in America from the 17th century through the 1960s. This continuity derives from an ongoing process of changing perceptions of the self, and a revisioning of pastoral care to adapt to these changing perceptions. The dynamic in this 350 year process is from self-denial to self-love to self-culture to self-mastery to self- realization. Holifield stresses that often two or more perceptions of the self have coexisted in any given epoch, typically in uneasy tension with one another. Also, even when pastoral care spokesmen have adopted a particular conception of the self, as in the 20th century's emphasis on self-realization, considerable effort has been expended in refining the concept (and, perhaps in the case of the self- realization concept, virtually refining it out of existence). In fact, Holifield terminates his narrative at the end of the l960s (in spite of pleas from readers of the unpublished manuscript to cover the l970s) on the grounds that the self-realization conception had just about run its course by this time. As an historian and not a prognosticator, he does not try to identify what shape the emergent conception of the self is likely to take. Since I agree that the late l960s marked the end of an era in pastoral care, and that we are still in the midst of a major paradigm shift, I am one reader who wholeheartedly agrees with his decision to end where he did.

For me, the chapters on the 20th century (chs. 5-8) were the most compelling reading. No doubt, this was partly because they deal with more recent events, and with persons and ideas I already knew something about. But, in addition, Holifield's interpretive and analytical

505 - A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization

skills are more clearly self-evident in these chapters. I especially liked his illuminating discussions of the influence of various theological schools (e.g. theological realism, process theology, Tillich's correlational theology, Buber's relational theology) on the pastoral care movement during the post World War II era. I anticipated an emphasis on the enormous influence of Carl Rogers, and Holifield here does not disappoint. I was surprised but generally convinced by his emphasis on Erich Fromm's influence. He argues that Fromm and Rogers were influential figures in a major shift in pastoral care spokesmen's views on self-realization. In the early decades of the 20th century, self- realization was conceived as supported by, and supportive of, American social institutions. Now, these social, institutions were conceived as inimical to self-realization. How could such "dehumanizing bureaucracies" possibly contribute to self-realization? The theological realism of the Niebuhrs and Tillich, with its vigorous attack on all forms of idolatry, provided a powerful theological rationale for this critical view of American social institutions. More recent attempts to clarify the "context" of pastoral care are, in part, efforts to reduce this bifurcation between "self" and "society," but the privatization of the goal of self-realization is the unfortunate and to a large extent unintentional legacy of the pastoral care movement of the 1950s and 60s.

At times, Holifield seems to acknowledge that there may be little resemblance between what the pastoral care spokesmen of the day advocate or envision and what actually takes place in American parish life. However, this cautious if not somewhat cynical view is balanced by another view advanced in the Epilogue, namely, his suspicion that "a representative selection of pastoral conversations in the late twentieth century would probably encompass the whole history of pastoral counseling in America…. Every pastor, wittingly or unwittingly, adopts some 'theory' of pastoral counseling, whether it be derived from the seventeenth century or from the twentieth" (349-50). This second view suggests that the views of pastoral care spokesmen do have an impact on American parish life, even when these views are no longer in vogue. It also suggests that pastoral care, as actually practiced, exhibits a healthy pluralism.

Donald Capps
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey