210 - A Descriptive Appraisal

A Descriptive Appraisal, 1935 - 1980
By Seward Hiltner

"I have regarded my own meaning of pastoral theology as bringing together into some kind of coherence the various concerns and interests I have had since the days of my own formal theological education and CPE studies…. Since pastoral theology is to me the center of all my concerns, the 'hear not' diagnosis is a bit unsettling despite the sturdy group that takes my construction seriously."

WHAT the editor suggested to me was "something of reflective substance evaluating the victories and defeats over the years." In other words, what response did I receive to the professional energies I invested in the promotion of causes and programs or the advocacy of ideas and points of view?

The longer I reflected, the clearer it became that responses had varied in relation to different areas of my interest. I was compelled, therefore, to construct a kind of typology of the responses. Let me share this structure with the reader. The first of four categories may be called listening only later. At the time I first studied an area, or advocated something, very few people paid attention. Later on, usually much later, a lot of people also became concerned, sometimes took positions similar to what I had set forth earlier, and almost never recognized that I had been there beforehand. If we assume that I then and they now are right about something, then this category could also be called untimely prophecy.

The second category can be put in shorthand as hearing - words-but - not - tune. Something in what I was advocating or promoting did catch attention, not always at once but within a few years. But what the hearers then did with it turned out to be different in at least some very important respects from what I had originally meant. The actual result was by no means always worse than I had intended. Sometimes program

Seward Hiltner is Professor of Theology and Personality, Princeton Theological Seminary. A graduate of Lafayette College and the University of Chicago, he is the author of many books in the field of pastoral care and theology, the most recent being Theological Dynamics (I 972). A consultant for the Menninger Foundation, a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY, Dr. Hiltner has served on a succession of councils and committees, pioneering in the areas of hospital chaplaincy, clinical pastoral education, mental health, and problems of aging. An outstanding leader in the field and a prolific worker and writer, he is retiring this year from active teaching. This "Self-Appraisal" was solicited by the Editor with the request that it be a personal retrospective on his activities in many areas of concern to both the church and theology.

211 - A Descriptive Appraisal

growth required compromises I had not foreseen, but with good results considering all factors, Nevertheless, the central concern from which I had begun, very often a need to make and maintain a theological perspective on the matter at issue, was what was often either neglected or set aside.

The third category has the shortest shorthand of all, and occurred when the people I was trying to influence, although they had ears, were hearing not. I cannot say of course that nobody heard me. For most of my career I have had some students, and captive audiences of that kind must listen even when no one else does. Nevertheless, some of my concerns have been heard or heeded by very few people either then or now.

The fourth and last type of response to my efforts may be characterized, with apologies to Theodore Reik, as listening with the third ear. This kind of event has taken place when another or some others have been able to make a good deal more of one of my concerns than I myself had been able to do. As the reader will see, not every concern of mine fits neatly into a single category. On occasion, for instance, some of those who seemed to me to be "hearing words but not tune" turned out also to be "listening with the third ear."

I

Listening Only Later (LOL). Just after World War II, I became interested in the problems and potentialities of older people, secured a foundation grant to do some research, persuaded Paul B. Maves and J. Lennart Cedarleaf to do the work and, with my help, to report on the study in a book, Older People and the Church (1949). In spite of a few obvious anachronisms, the volume seems to me not to have been surpassed even yet for an over - all view and sensible program. The secular literature has of course advanced enormously in the interim. Finally, during the 1970s, church interest in older people has become plain. But that was long after our book, which sold poorly, had gone out of print.

Another LOL area was human sexuality with emphasis on the pastoral, ethical, and theological dimensions. My early work in this area was summed up in Sex Ethics and the Kinsey Reports (1953) and Sex and the Christian Life (1957), emphasizing the need for church people to take scientific findings into account, to update pastoral and ethical principles about sex, but to bring basic theological perspectives to bear on the subject without apology. Although the latter book, in paperback, sold well, both books were largely ignored by ministers and other church leaders I had hoped to reach. Years later the concern for human sexuality increased even though it tended to remain defensive. For instance, in my own denomination, a report on human sexuality, put together with my help in the late 1960s, created little stir, perhaps just because it was well balanced and constructive. But in the late 1970s a report on homosexuality created the biggest stir of the decade. The

212 - A Descriptive Appraisal

denomination's action on the report was intelligent, if a bit defensive, but the fact is that most people approached homosexuality without having done basic study or reflection about human sexuality more generally.

A third area of LOL, more complicated than the first two above, was addictions beginning with alcohol. When Yale University (later Rutgers) began a summer school of alcohol studies in the early 1940s, I was able to promote the participation of ministers from various denominations. Through that school, and many programs influenced by it, the completely defensive posture of most churches over alcohol after the repeal of national prohibition was altered, not necessarily to permit drinking but clearly to be more concerned and more discriminating about the victims of alcohol addiction. More ministers certainly do more intelligent pastoral work with alcoholics and their families than before. But very little church influence is exercised to try to improve facilities for treatment, which are far from what they should be. Drug addictions of various kinds have been present all along, but have received church attention only in recent years. Even now, the advocacy of general services, and actual pastoral work, are small in light of the need.

A fourth LOL concern of mine was the relation of ethics to pastoral care, which I explored in various ways and wrote my doctoral essay about. Only in recent years, however, has there been serious work in this area except by Joseph Fletcher. A recent volume by Don Browning has elicited widespread interest.

The last concern I shall mention as a LOL is the psychology of religion. This discipline had begun with psychologists almost entirely (James, Leuba, Starbuck, et al.), but by the 1930s was mostly a sideline for a few seminary teachers. In the 1940s I advocated including the clinical dimensions as Anton Boisen had demonstrated, and also that the researchers be sophisticated theologically as well as psychologically. The actual growth of this discipline took a different course, eliciting interest primarily in a group of psychologists through the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and other groups. The amount of significant empirical research to date is, however, relatively small; and theological sophistication is not notable except in a few persons like Paul W. Pruyser. It is interesting that Pruyser, perhaps partly because of his theological discernment, was able to write the first general psychology of religion organized entirely by psychological categories rather than in the traditional categories that are a kind of religious potpourri.

II

Hearing Words but Not Tune (HWBNT). For a long time I thought that the concern into which I had poured my earliest professional efforts, clinical pastoral education (CPE), was in this class. In the 1930s I had been student, supervisor, and the first full - time executive. I advocated that this training be primarily understood as part of pastoral

213 - A Descriptive Appraisal

and theological education, a point that became true only in the late 1940s for pastoral education and is still only ambiguously true in getting theological matters significantly into the programs. The movement has not only grown greatly since World War II (from 1925 to 1945 it was very small); it has also won a clear place for itself with the primary agents of theological education, the seminaries, including Roman Catholics since the Second Vatican Council. In addition, its ecumenicity has been remarkable, not only crossing denominational lines but also (in 1967) creating a single national organization out of four separate bodies. In the movement, there is a balance between centralization and decentralization. Regulations and procedures are now finely honed. There are current efforts to set the training in terms of "spiritual formation" as well as "theological education," and theology itself gets more attention in many places than a few years ago. I have therefore concluded that CPE, in response to my concerns, has become as much LWTTE, listening with the third ear, as HWBNT, hearing words but not tune.

Something similar is true of my concern for chaplaincy in health and welfare institutions, although the "third ear" is less evident than in the CPE movement. With Russell Dicks, I constructed the first statements of standards for chaplains, that included special training, doing the work in a clergy role, and real cooperation with other personnel. None of those conditions had previously obtained for the few chaplaincies there were. Numerical growth has been great since World War II, in public and private institutions alike. Increasingly, some special training is generally required. Most of the sheer miscellaneous duties (like running the library) that previously cut down on genuinely pastoral ministry, have been taken care of by others, leaving chaplains free for religious ministry. And cooperation with other personnel has become standard. Indeed, it is on the last point that words without tune may be most evident. In some places, chaplains have become almost indistinguishable from psychologists or social workers except when they are conducting worship. Sometimes, also, what chaplains study may be long on the latest in psychological therapies but short on theology including pastoral theology. Nevertheless, I did not dream in 1940, when standards for chaplaincy were first discussed, that both number and quality would have increased so greatly in the next forty years.

Another HWBNT was mental health. From the beginning I thought that mental health had much to contribute to church and clergy, but movement the other way seemed equally important, and one of my first publications tried to show the two - way movement. I served on the board of the original body, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, and was active in many ways in the secular movement all along, as well as trying to involve the churches. Before 1950, the movement was largely controlled by professional people especially psychiatrists. Since then, it has been much more a lay movement. I now believe this shift was inevitable and positive, in that only so could citizens generally be

214 - A Descriptive Appraisal

reached so that public officials could be widely expected to do things to foster mental health. But the move from education and study to promotion and advertising meant that mental health no longer carried the intellectual responsibilities that could draw the healing professions together on a basis going beyond pragmatism or professional self-interest. The fact that the mental health movement has made some basic progress in arousing public concern and the public purse is good. But no other movement has been able to occupy the central position, as mental health once did, of making the helping professions justify their work in terms transcending their particular contributions. As to the churches and mental health, the result has been mixed. Some took mental health too much as a new savior, while others (except in the privacy of the pastor's study) are as negative as ever about mental sufferers.

Closely allied with mental health is my concern for both interprofessional discussion and cooperation. In pragmatic America, it was to be expected that activity would be dominant over talk. Led especially by CPE supervisors and chaplains, practical cooperation in hospitals and related settings has become not only more frequent but also more taken for granted. It has not, however, generally gone along with more or deeper mutual discussion of the issues. In relation especially to physicians, it is possible that a new chapter is now being written in this area. Many of the recently emerging specialists in biomedical ethics have been trained in religious ethics or chaplaincy and CPE. Clearly there is much more interest in biomedical ethics. But at the grass roots level the discussions are often not interprofessional at all, and seldom take in ordinary clergy or other church people. The ethical issues are indeed of great importance; but there is a danger that, especially in the minds of physicians, the deeper issues of principle in relation to religion, theology, churches, and clergy may simply be set on the shelf as if the topic were exhausted by questions about abortion, the timing of death, or the evils of cloning human beings. Let me, therefore, pay tribute to the "third ear" that has produced many good things in interprofessional relationships that I did not anticipate years ago. But let me also express concern that most such relationships are so pragmatic as almost to eliminate deeper discussion except on specific ethical issues, so that the discussions we do have too often lack a proper context and background.

In relation to the now very widespread concern for pastoral care and pastoral counseling, I must bring also an appraisal mainly of HWBNT but also with some LWTTE, of mainly words without tune but with bits of third ear listening. From the 1930s I advocated more attention to these activities in local churches as well as hospitals, providing CPE opportunities to more students and ministers, taking the subject more seriously in seminaries, and using all relevant wisdom from secular sources while packaging the program in clear pastoral garments. For the most part, the movements have been along those lines since the 1940s. But from the start I also believed that pastoral counseling was

215 - A Descriptive Appraisal

inseparable from pastoral care, that pastors should have no preference for counseling in the study against bedside calls in the hospital, the difference being the need and readiness of the other persons not preferences of the pastor. When specialized pastoral counselors began to emerge in significant numbers in the early 1960s, the national organization that was founded did succeed in putting out of business some quacks going under a pastoral label. Perhaps unwittingly, they tended to value formal counseling over the many less structured situations of pastoral care. In a much used book by Howard Clinebell, one of the early leaders of the specialist movement, every pastoral care activity was translated into counseling terms so that there was "grief counseling" and counseling on every kind of personal or family problem, while pastoral care had largely disappeared in any sense that made it a larger category than counseling.

My current observations suggest that the present situation is mixed on this point. Where the church relationships of pastoral counseling groups are clear cut, counseling is still viewed as a special dimension of care. Where those connections are either cloudy or almost non - existent, concern for a care that is not counseling either disappears or is put in an inferior position. In my book, Pastoral Counseling (1949), I showed that ministers confronted more "pre - counseling" than "counseling" situations, and ought to take the former as seriously as the latter.

Even from my early work, but increasingly in recent years, I have emphasized the importance of using theological issues and teachings in guiding and appraising pastoral care and counseling. Part of my haranguing has been due to my observation that, although wide acquiescence is given to the general idea, very seldom is it followed in practice in a way that makes a difference in understanding and dealing with specific situations. My concern is of course not to take some rigid or unexamined theological belief and apply it in a Procrustean way to a specific situation. I presuppose theology to be a matter of depth that combines conviction with inquiry, and issues with answers that are never beyond scrutiny.

In recent years, I have seen that what I first observed about pastoral care and theology is also true of all the activities of ministry, although the gaps do not always appear in the same form. My interest in this discrepancy remains lively, and I hope to publish more about it in the near future.

My own initial CPE emphasized case histories as Anton Boisen had developed them, studying what he called "living human documents" to get light on the "issues of sin and salvation" and therefore seeking light on the concerns of theology itself much more than exploring specific techniques for helping distressed people. But I became also familiar, in the 1930s, with the "verbatim" methods pioneered by Russell Dicks, used to study method or technique in pastoral conversation. When I began teaching and writing about such matters in the 1940s, I saw the need to combine these two approaches. From Boisen I acquired the bent

216 - A Descriptive Appraisal

toward understanding dynamics and maintaining a theological perspective at all times although learning everything possible from cognate disciplines. From Dicks I took sensitivity to actual encounters, ways of examining method and technique, and the knowledge that the study of actual conversations is as revelatory about the pastor as about the parishioner. I first combined all these factors in teaching at Union and Yale, then wrote about it in Pastoral Counseling (1949). In much of the education in pastoral care that goes on today, attention is paid to combining all those factors with the frequent exception of a serious theological perspective. Perhaps I am a bit petty in noting how seldom I have been credited with bringing together the basic contributions of Boisen with those of Dicks. Boisen himself regarded Dicks' work favorably, but considered it utterly different from his own. Dicks did not pay much attention to Boisen's basic claims.

Along with my attempts to bring the Boisen and Dicks contributions into unity, CPE had convinced me that there is no substitute, in learning, for submitting samples of one's own actual pastoral care to critique. So far as I know, Harry Bone and I were the first, at Union Seminary in New York, to use the ordinary experiences of students in field education (written up verbatim) for teaching pastoral care. In many seminaries as well as CPE centers, this basic principle is followed today in some measure. But large classes and limited time often mean substitutes and therefore absence of the basic factor of learning through supervised actual experience. This is understandable when it is a result of logistical pressures. But when it is made a virtue, it is something else, as in the advocacy of cases dealt with by persons other than students, because they are written up more fully than they could possibly do. So, on what I have advocated about teaching methods for pastoral care, the answer is mixed.

When I went to the Chicago faculty in 1950, we called my field "religion and personality" (now rechristened "religion and psychological studies" at Chicago). I suppose that "religion" sounded less potentially doctrinaire than "theology"; but we were in fact dealing with theology (non - dogmatically, I believe) as informing and being informed by the studies that have contributed to understanding human personality (which may indeed be psychological in a broad sense but which include much more than is found in departments of psychology). In addition, very much in the program, although not clearly witnessed to in the title, was the commitment to relating theory and practice, using basic insights from theology and psychology as bases for professional practice, and studying specific professional situations for the light their dynamics can throw especially on theological understanding. I am uncertain to what extent the current programs at Chicago continue to combine all these elements. Nor can I be certain to what extent they are considered or ignored at most other seminaries. I have an impression that at many places the field is freezing in a way that regards its theory to be some approach in psychology, or some combination of psychologi -

217 - A Descriptive Appraisal

cal approaches, rather at the expense of any serious work on theological bases. It seems also that not a little of the work on the operational, or activity, side, in borrowing (appropriately) from secular disciplines, tends to blur the distinction between the proper role of the minister and that of other professional persons. The "religion and personality" title for a field is used very little, which may be as well.

At Chicago in 1950, I was able to start a Ph.D. program designed to educate a few persons at a level that would enable them to do basic research, teach on seminary faculties, and pioneer in various dimensions of the developing field. I was insistent that the primary base be theological although both appropriating and critiquing material from partly cognate secular disciplines; also that study in the field be in some way a source of theological wisdom and not just an application of it; and that no student be exempt, on the one side, from the need to reflect with some depth on basic principles, nor, on the other side, from understanding of and experience with competent professional practice. In the early years at Chicago there were virtually no other programs except that at Boston University, and I was overrun.

When I moved to Princeton Seminary in 1961, I developed a doctoral program similar, in basic principles, to that at Chicago, although designedly very much smaller. When I ask to what extent the principles of the Chicago Ph.D. program have been followed by other institutions (than Princeton) granting doctorates in this general area, the answer turns out to be very small. Partly owing to factors of geography and money and time, not a few of today's doctoral graduates come through schools of education, departments of psychology, programs in counseling of various kinds - usually with no help, during their course, on either theological relatedness or meaning of a pastoral role. Such persons are often committed to theology and pastoral practice. But in the absence of help along those lines during doctoral study, they are always in danger of retreating.

In the very few places where a Ph.D. program in this field (whatever it may be called) is offered with some kind of theological base, I have a mixed impression about the students. Some seem to want theory without much exposure to supervised practice; and others seem mainly to want a boost for practice with theory as a necessary chore on the way. All of them, however, become better prepared for pastoral theological work than do those whose degrees are taken in wholly secular contexts.

III

Hearing Not (HN). The most important candidate for this category is pastoral theology. When I went to the Chicago faculty in 1950, I selected "pastoral theology" as my own title, and foreshadowed my effort a few years later to give a clear modern meaning to the phrase, to utilize parts of the various meanings assigned to the term in the past, but to part company with those who would relegate anything called pastoral theology to limbo. During the next few years, and extending to

218 - A Descriptive Appraisal

the present, I have regarded my own meaning of pastoral theology as bringing together into some kind of coherence the various concerns and interests I have had since the days of my own formal theological education and CPE studies. The clearest statement of basic principles was provided in my Preface to Pastoral Theology (1958).

Since this book is now back in print as a paperback, it may yet have some influence not evident at present. I am aware that a few people, especially among seminary teachers in this field, do make significant use of the book with their students, and some even believe there is nothing, of any point of view, to stack up beside it. To move seriously with me through the contents of that volume, however, readers must believe deeply in the importance of a basic theory of ministry, of pastoral care, and of what theology is as a field (or fields) of inquiry. In the book I do address several questions that many ministers and theological students are not asking. At many times, therefore, I have felt that (save for a small group) they "hear not." And since pastoral theology is to be the center of all my concerns, the HN diagnosis is a bit unsettling despite the sturdy group that takes my construction seriously, even though they are not "disciples."

Since pastoral theology is one important aspect (but not the whole) of understanding ministry and the theory behind, it, my Preface to Pastoral Theology included brief chapters on what I regarded as the cognate operational branches of theology along with pastoral theology. And in Ferment in the Ministry (1969), I tried to put my thinking about these matters in a somewhat more popular way. Although there was some good feedback on the volume, my hope that it might insinuate some principles to people who had not dared to try the Preface were in vain. So the score to date on pastoral theology seems to be in the "hearing not" category.

Perhaps I should include here some of the concerns I have cultivated about theological education, beyond the aspects of CPE, pastoral care teaching, and others mentioned previously. It was Ross Snyder and I who convened the group that is now the Association for Professional Education for Ministry. The original purposes were to create a learned society for persons working seriously in any dimension of the operational fields of theology, and to foster the discussion and cooperation between such persons and those competent in other branches of theology. Perhaps our original hopes were too ambitious. Although the Association is still a useful body, almost all of the various subdisciplines have now created organizations of their own; the attempt to effect new levels of cooperation with the "classical" disciplines is usually confined to having one classicist lecture at each convention; and the publications coming out of the group seldom break new ground in relating theory and practice.

During the 1950s and 1960s I gave considerable time to the Association of Theological Schools. My first major assignment was on academic freedom. The second resulted in the Master of Divinity

214 - A Descriptive Appraisal

degree, as a compromise between those who wanted to retain the old Bachelor of Divinity and those who were determined to have change of some kind. On those two points I was heard rather well, and results seem generally good. My third and then fatal task, however, was to chair a group to set standards for a professional doctor's degree. My conviction was that an earned doctor's degree ought to have high standards, although a professional degree's standards should not be about the same kind of scholarship as the Ph.D. Our Committee's proposals were dynamited by representatives of schools that had then, or were then planning, professional doctorates with standards considerably lower than those our group recommended. Later the Association did emerge with a set of standards, which are perhaps as much as could be agreed on, but which now permit Doctor of Ministry degrees to be conferred for work that seems to me, by any stretch of the imagination, far below the level of an earned doctorate.

As to theological education closer to home, at Chicago while I was there, and at Princeton more recently, the programs in my own field have been as close to what I believe in as the money and personnel would permit. In terms of the professional doctorate, I was certainly listened to when the Princeton D.Min. was constructed, and in every stage of ironing out its kinks ever since. As to the Ph.D. degree in all theological fields at Princeton, the quality is in accord with my principles except at the point of the comprehensive examination, where a combination of student anxiety and professional obsession has set the examinations in some areas over such a time period that the notion of a comprehensive has been lost.

IV

Listening with the Third Ear (LWTTE). As it has turned out in the writing, my reflections under the first three categories compelled me to acknowledge, along with the things that they did not hear or heard improperly or heard only much later, that some "they" listened to me better than I listened to myself, and emerged with things far better than I had envisioned. These evidences of "grace" were noted all through the previous discussion. Let me just remind the reader of a few of them.

Even though CPE still seems to me not to be as theologically oriented as is desirable, the general maturity of the movement, the determination to help students think and act pastorally, and the ability to include different views and personalities, all these and other factors represent the "third ear" or the "spirit."

There are far more chaplains, with far better training, and with better cooperation among them and with the churches, than I imagined possible in the early days. If there are still some deficiencies in this movement, as there are, they do not negate some positive happenings going beyond even my aims.

With older people, human sexuality, alcoholism, and perhaps mental health, all are being seriously pursued in the secular world; and with

220 - A Descriptive Appraisal

some of them the churches are now beginning to rethink their views and responsibilities seriously. The interest may have come late but it is here to some degree. I am less sanguine about interprofessional relationships. Working cooperation is often much better; but except for hot ethical issues, I see no improvement at the level of basic discussion.

On religion and personality, Ph.D. programs, and perhaps some aspects of theological education, the "third ear" seems evident in some spots even if not generally. And so perhaps is pastoral theology, where I feel most alienated by an absence of listening.

V

Let me close by expressing two kinds of concern. The first picks up what is noted at various points above, namely, the tendency in many aspects of this held to neglect a serious engagement between theological principles and the area in question. I have noted several of the ways in which I have tried to approach that matter. Still another may be found in my Theological Dynamics (1972), where I attempt to suggest a new angle on understanding theological teachings that appear to me to emerge when I look at the sub - surface factors often in conflict, being helped to the latter by involvement in concrete pastoral situations of various kinds. So far as I can judge, readers have generally appreciated the conclusions I reached, whether they agreed or otherwise. But because I minimized the "apparatus" that went into my reflections, there is little evidence that I succeeded in conveying my basic point about method. Maybe it serves me right. But by one means or another, I intend to continue trying to stimulate the relating of theology with concrete experience.

The second point is a feeling of fear that I may, even though unintentionally, have contributed to the current preoccupation with the self - realization and self - development movements as one - sided forms of what Christopher Lasch calls narcissism. That has been far from my intent. Becoming one's self is a good thing unless it excludes the reality of relationships with others or denies the cantankerousness in even the best of selves. But it is always an insufficient criterion of human relationships and commitments.

Victories or defeats? Answer: a bit of both, often in the same area of concern.