Dead Christians Society

Here’s a list from Tom Oden’s 1984 Fortress Press book Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition. First, Oden argues modern pastoral care has become hopelessly muddled and weakened by a process of disassociation from its historical, theological roots. It must encounter “the classic tradition”–represented in particular by the book given to all Western bishops for a millennium: Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care. Oden argues that when modern pastoral care encounters this classic tradition, it will realize that it must change in some fundamental ways. And it will gain the resources to effect that change:

Remember as you look at this list that Oden had trained and practiced in both liberal theology and the many faddish techniques of counseling and psychotherapy that were so popular in the 1960s and 1970s. What a wonderful transformation he had experienced through his encounter with what he calls “the classical tradition of pastoral care”—that is, his readings in some of the people we would call “the church fathers”:

Pastoral care must be reconstructed so that it becomes [the following is verbatim]:

—informed by Christian theology;

—able to provide a credible pastoral theodicy;

—able to work through difficult cases of conscience;

—aware of the dialectic of grace and freedom, gospel and law;

—able to point saliently to the providence of God in the midst of our human alienations;

—aware of the intrinsic connections between community, healing, and proclamation (koinonia, therapeia, and kerygma); and

—well-grounded in the classical understanding of the triune God.

If we listen to the classical tradition as we prepare to do modern pastoral counseling, Oden asks, what kinds of practical differences would we expect this would make in our counseling?

—Intercessory prayer would again become an important aspect of pastoral counsel.

—The antinomianism of contemporary pastoral care (under the tutelage of hedonic pop psychologies) would be more effectively resisted by a more balanced dialectic of gospel and law.

—Marriage counseling would tend to function more within the framework of a traditional Christian doctrine of matrimony rather than essentially as a hedonic cost/benefit calculus.

—Empathy training for pastoral counseling would be more deliberately and self-consciously grounded in an incarnational understanding of God’s participation in human alienation.

—Out of our recent history of exaggerated self-expression, compulsive feeling disclosure, and narcissism, we may be in for a new round of experimentation in askesis, self-discipline, self-denial, and rigorism, which might in turn threaten to become exaggerated in a masochistic direction and thus again need the corrective of a balanced Christian anthropology.

—The diminished moral power of the previously prevailing momentum of individualistic autonomy and self-assertiveness may call for a new emphasis in group process upon corporate responsibility, mutual accountability, moral self-examination, and social commitment, an emphasis that would be undergirded by studies in Bible and tradition.

—We are ready for a new look at the traditional Protestant pattern of regular pastoral visitation, which could enter many doors now closed to most secular therapists.

—Pastoral counsel would work harder than it is now working to develop a thorough and meaningful pastoral theodicy that takes fully into account the philosophical and moral objections to classical Christian arguments on the problem of evil and the meaning of suffering, yet with new attentiveness to the deeper pastoral intent of that tradition.

—The new synthesis would interweave evangelical witness more deliberately into the process of pastoral conversation rather than disavowing witness or disassociating proclamation from therapeutic dialogue.

—Group experimentation would continue, but be rooted with more awareness of classical Christian understandings of witness, service, and community.

—Older therapeutic approaches such as fasting, dietary control, meditation, and concrete acts of restitution would have new importance.

—The now atrophied concept of call to ministry may need to be thoroughly restudied and reconceived as a hinge concept of the pastoral office and of ordination.

—Contemporary pastoral theology in dialogue with the classical tradition may learn to speak in a more definite way about the spiritual and moral qualifications for ministry, reflecting the tradition’s persistent concern for moral character, humility, zeal, and self-denial.

—The arts of spiritual direction that have been developed, nurtured, reexamined, and refined over a dozen centuries of pastoral experience may be due for serious restudy. Efforts could be made to bring these resources back into contemporary pastoral interactions that presuppose post-Freudian understandings.

—Pastoral care would become less prone to messianic faddism, because it would have built into it a critical apparatus more deeply rooted in the Christian tradition.

—The term “pastoral counseling” would again be reclaimed as an integral part of the pastoral office, intrinsically correlated with liturgy, preaching, and the nurture of Christian community and relatively less identified with purely secularized, nonecclesial, theologically emasculated fee-basis counseling.