349 - The Minister as Diagnostician: Personal Problems in Pastoral Perspective

The Minister as Diagnostician:
Personal Problems in Pastoral Perspective
By Paul Pruyser
Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1976. 144 pp. $4.95.

The identity problems of the minister are never more acute than when dealing with those whom Paul Pruyser calls "problem-laden people." For those in life crises and emotional distress, what is a minister good for? What is a minister? Ministers are easily tempted

350 - The Minister as Diagnostician: Personal Problems in Pastoral Perspective

and long accustomed to feel "not much" and to defer to, or refer to, the psychiatric professionals, or else to try to imitate them, either sheepishly or zealously. Or, more in earlier days, to summon up moral judgments as their distinctive contribution. Or, to inventory and exploit distinctive "doings": ministers visit homes, conduct worship, recruit people to groups or to tasks that may be therapeutic, and become constantly available as a kind of professional "good neighbor," trouble shooter, or errand runner.

Paul Pruyser urges ministers to reassert their own identity, their own important role with "problem-laden persons," not so much in terms of what they do-no particular therapeutic moves are suggested here-but in terms of what they see-and what they say. This book is a gentle pep-talk to ministers to do their own thing, which, Pruyser says, is to guide persons to appraise their problems in theological perspective, with the insights of sin, repentance, and grace; faith, hope, and love; idolatry, trust, and awe. Why do people come to pastors? Because, Pruyser says, they want just such theological perspective for themselves and their problems, and clergy should not sidestep this request.

In one chapter, Pruyser offers "guidelines" for such pastoral perspective. The chapter affords a rich and sensitive discussion of the phenomenology of the religious life under the rubrics of the sense of the holy, providence, faith, grace, repentance, communion, and vocation. Pruyser calls this his "intuitive theology," his blend of clinical psychology and pastoral theology, and one recognizes derivation from humanistic psychology more readily than from systematic Christian theology.

The final chapter illustrates, in five brief cases, how pastors have used these perspectives in helping persons come to perceive their plights. In these accounts by pastors, the perspectives have been used more as checklists and as labels, one suspects, than Pruyser would like, and perhaps more as discussion enders rather than discussion openers. The cases all point to happy endings, in terms of closer participation in conventional church activities and closer allegiance to conventional moral values.

Much of this book, urging pastors to take courage to make diagnoses in their own terms, makes its own diagnosis of why they have so much trouble doing so. But the diagnoses tend to be of situations: too much influence from Carl Rogers' distrust of diagnosis, too much domination from psychiatry, too narrow a notion of theological and moral categories, etc. There is little, if any, diagnosis of the minister's own identity crisis in the pastoral theological terms-the dilemmas of faith and trust and communion and vocation-which Pruyser recommends the minister use for others' difficulties.

Nor does Pruyser consider here that there may be good reasons for a pastor to be more psychologically tuned, not just religiously, to turning aside occasionally the people's preference for viewing their prob-

351 - The Minister as Diagnostician: Personal Problems in Pastoral Perspective

lems in terms of sin, of God's holiness and expectations, of good relations with the established church. As a sensitive psychologist of religion, Pruyser has shown on many other occasions the merits of supplementing the religious perspective with the psychological, and he accepts here the principle of multiple perspectives. Some of the cases may remind some readers that religious language, especially in the service of puritanism, may be used to suppress, not enhance, personal discovery; to cover, not resolve, tormenting conflicts. There are real issues at stake in sorting out the difference, for example, between the sense of sin (over a sexual act, or non-act) which is best taken at face value-as Pruyser here recommends-and the sense of sin (attached to the same sexual act) which is best understood as derived from larger and older feelings of depression and of low self worth.

Pruyser usefully cautions against blind imitation of psychologists and against undue reductionism and denial of ministers' and people's religious intuitions. But conventional religious formulations can also blind and enslave. Pruyser acknowledges this, but he does not, in this book, help us sort out the difference between appropriate and less appropriate reliance on religious perspectives, a sorting that would much enhance the courage Pruyser wants us to have to use religious language.

352 - The Minister as Diagnostician: Personal Problems in Pastoral Perspective

It is striking these days, at least to me, to read a book in which all ministers are steadfastly male and in which women are stereotypically weak and sick, or become strong only by becoming seductive. "If the parishioner is a woman, she may have a crush on the pastor, childishly hoping that some of her erotic wishes will be fulfilled" (p. 85) is an all too typical sentence, unbalanced by pictures of women in helping roles, or in strong postures, or even suffering problems except those that derive from their relations with men. An author wanting to raise our consciousness to new perspectives cannot attend to all new perspectives at once. But it does seem ironic that a book that so vigorously urges one group (clergy) to wrest their own identities from a dependence on those (psychiatrists and psychologists) from whom they so easily feel a derivative status may also discourage another group (women) who are trying to heed the same call.

James E. Dittes
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut