Pastoral theology thus came to describe both the education for and practice of clerical leadership and its tasks in a manner more formal, regularized, and “scientific” than ministry manuals alone could provide, though the manuals continued to be utilized. The tasks garnering pastoral theology’s attention included pastoral care (poimenics), instruction in the faith (catechetics), applying moral principles to life experiences (casuistry), and, in some circles, preaching (homiletics), though Protestants typically treated preaching separately. Pastoral theology aimed to prepare the minister for attending to the four ancient pastoral functions required for “the cure of souls,” namely, healing, sustaining, guiding, and reconciling (Clebsch and Jaekle, 1964, 32–66). Rather than being scholarly or intellectual in its focus, however, pastoral theology was explicitly practice oriented. It was grounded in the application to pastoral experience of various rules and techniques derived largely from more abstract theological principles and honed by experienced clergy. Hence, pastoral theology was applied systematic or dogmatic theology. In keeping with classical understandings, it often took the form of hints and directions for how clergy should carry out their duties in various situations while guided by doctrinal standards of the Christian faith and by the wisdom provided in the literature (manuals) of pastoral theology.
Due to the influences of Schleiermacher and Nitzsch, by the mid-nineteenth century some began to describe pastoral theology as a component of “practical” theology, which along with “philosophical” and “historical” theology, named the primary areas or disciplines within theological education or what came to be called “the theological encyclopedia.” While Schleiermacher and Nitzsch’s influences were strong—practical theology, like pastoral theology, came to have varied meanings (though the former typically included the study of ethics along with many of the functions and tasks of pastoral leadership cited previously).
Schleiermacher is thought by some to have perpetuated the view that practical theology (including its component, pastoral theology) was reducible to applied principles and techniques of ministry, what Edward Farley has termed the “clerical paradigm” (Farley, 1983, 87), and also that an attempt was made by Nitzsch to correct this way of thinking. However, a close reading of Schleiermacher’s work reveals that he, like Nitzsch, resisted the notion of practical theology as “a mere application of theological knowledge of some other type” and as being concerned simply with techniques or technical knowledge (Nitzsch, 1847, 33). Both men, in fact, claimed that practical theology was an autonomous theological discipline involving the acquisition and use of the minister’s own “inner constitution,” or habitus, “the truth and purity of a Christian disposition” (Schleiermacher, 1990, 114), “rules of art” as opposed to “legalistic directives” (Schleiermacher, 1990, 25, 135), and that practical theology required “a convergence of all theoretical knowledge of Christianity that is becoming a church in order to establish a methodological consciousness for official practice” (Nitzsch, 1847, 34). Hence, though Schleiermacher’s legacy is the clerical paradigm, as Farley suggests, this is not what Schleiermacher envisioned and desired. He and Nitzsch sought to ground how pastors conceptualized their work in ministry, what that work entailed, and how it should be carried out in a manner more methodologically rich and intentional than classical understandings. Even so, this notion of pastoral theology as a part of practical theology, and as concerned merely with the training of clergy in the applied principles and techniques of ministry, prevailed in both Europe and North America, more or less, until the early twentieth century.
Twentieth Century
Throughout much of the twentieth century, European thinking continued to follow largely the clerical paradigm, often substituting the term “pastoral studies” to denote a focus on the training of, and skills for, pastoral ministry, and appealing largely to the principles of applied theology to describe pastoral theological method. In North America and Great Britain, however, and among a comparatively small group in continental Europe, by the mid-twentieth century pastoral theology tended to be viewed differently: more broadly in some ways and more narrowly in others. In the North American context, due chiefly to the influences of Anton T. Boisen and his student, Seward Hiltner, as well as Wayne E. Oates and David E. Roberts, it broadened to include critical reflection on both theory and practice. No longer was pastoral theology conceived simply as applied dogmatic or systematic theology (theory) on the one hand, or merely as technical proficiency in ministry skills and wisdom (practice) on the other. Pastoral theology now gave much greater significance to the concrete lived experiences brought to pastors and, in Boisen’s case, to chaplains and those serving in institutional ministries, by persons with problems, conflicts, struggles, and needs. Consistent with Schleiermacher and Nitzsch’s visions for practical theology a century earlier, pastoral theology came to include knowledge and perspectives gleaned from theory and practice brought together in an ongoing mutual, critical, dialectical, correlational, and/or hermeneutical relationship. The result was that while theological theory and doctrine might guide and shape pastoral practice and thus pastoral theology, as classical views held, critical reflection upon practice, including the uniqueness of concrete experience, was expected to play a central role in guiding and shaping theory and doctrine. Giving particular attention to pastoral encounters with human needs as the basis for discerning the relationship between the Christian faith and lived experience, pastoral theology in the mid-twentieth century drew increasingly on resources provided by psychology, psychotherapy and related clinical perspectives, other human sciences (anthropology, sociology, critical theory), and hermeneutics. Pastoral theology appropriated critically the various perspectives offered by those disciplines and their perspectives in an attempt to “draw conclusions of a theological order from reflection on these observations” (Hiltner, 1958, 20).
Simultaneously, however, especially in North America, pastoral theology channeled its broadened critical reflections more narrowly: almost entirely toward pastoral care and counseling. Pastoral theology also became more or less exclusively tied to Protestant liberalism and its principal tenets, and was influenced especially by the work of theologian Paul Tillich. Moreover, moving away from its classical focus on the concerns and practices of ministry more broadly conceived, pastoral theology tended by the mid-twentieth century to limit its concern to experiences like bereavement, difficulties in relationships, crisis intervention, and addictions; to understandings and concerns of identity development, personality, and personhood; and to clinical conditions like depression and anxiety. Hence, pastoral theology’s primary focus became the individual person, those in closest relationship to the individual, and eventually to the various systems, environments, or contexts in which the individual lived and related. Particularly influential figures in the second half of the twentieth century in North America, who are representative of diverse understandings of, approaches to, and foci within pastoral theology, include Don S. Browning, Donald Capps, Howard Clinebell, James E. Dittes, Andrew D. Lester, Nancy J. Ramsay, Carroll Saussy, Charles W. Taylor, and Edward P. Wimberly; and outside North America, Paul Ballard, Alastair Campbell, and Eduard Thurneysen.
Various movements and disciplines closely related to, and often in conversation with, pastoral theology were either born or became more organized during this same period. Each tended, in various ways, to utilize theological and human scientific perspectives or conceptual frameworks for the concerns and tasks of pastoral care and counseling. Four are particularly noteworthy. The first was “personalist” care and counseling, which grew out of philosophical personalism as embraced especially by professors and students at Boston University, and was represented by Paul E. Johnson and Carroll Wise. It held that the individual person is the primary ontological category and unit of care, which includes the various components