In the early twentieth century, especially in North America, pastoral care became even more private in nature. Often limited to one-on-one encounters among clergy and laypersons, its focus increasingly became matters of mental illness and related problems.3 By the mid-twentieth century pastoral care was guided largely (and some would argue, primarily) by perspectives tied to psychology, psychotherapy, and related clinical disciplines; and, to a lesser degree, by other human sciences (i.e., anthropology, sociology, and critical theory), and by hermeneutics. At the same time, pastoral care drew less on religious language and perspectives as primary guides. With these changes of focus came less attention to and concern for “souls”—at least as traditionally viewed—and more attention on “personhood” as understood through the medical and human sciences.
What followed was the trend for ministers of care to function as armchair therapists. In the last half century, ministers have increasingly embraced the language and perspectives of the human sciences while often relegating their own principal language and perspectives (that is, religious or theological ones) to the back burner, if they weren’t taken off the stove altogether. I’ll say more about this trend in a few minutes.
Suffice it to say here that views on pastoral care have changed throughout the church’s history; and appropriately so. It would be a mistake to seek to reclaim a premodern view of persons or ministry. It would be equally unwise to embrace the care of souls for reasons of nostalgia. As a matter of fact, we must draw considerably from the human sciences and other bodies of knowledge to provide the most competent and faithful soul-care. Furthermore, unlike earlier periods of church life, we now rightly view pastoral care as including the work of congregations. It’s not the responsibility of clergy alone. Soul-care in our age requires the interest and efforts of faith communities and indeed the larger body of Christ—perhaps like never before. If for no other reasons than these, we do not want to go back to centuries-old views of pastoral care.
But there are aspects of those views that we would do well to embrace. A principal one, and the one I wish to highlight here, is that pastoral care requires close attention to the human soul. This attention, which arises from the value attributed to souls by the Christian faith, makes pastoral care distinctive among other types of care.
So I now need to say what I mean by “soul.” I have in mind something similar to what theologian Jürgen Moltmann says about the soul when discussing the concept of immortality (what he refers to as “personal eschatology”).4 According to Moltmann (2004), the soul denotes “the relationship of the whole person to the immortal God” (105).5 We should not view the soul (or the body, for that matter) as a discrete part or aspect of a human being. Rather, because it encompasses the whole person, the soul is best viewed as a locus for relationship between a person (in his or her entirety) and God. Much of Western Christianity, I would argue, has mistakenly viewed the body and soul as separate constituent parts of the human being. Influenced by Platonic idealism on the one hand, and by Cartesian dualism on the other, Western Christianity has typically embraced the necessary separation, and even sharp bifurcation, of body and soul; and, more recently, of body, mind, and soul—the latter idea maintaining that the mind serves as a bridge between the other two (incongruent)aspects of personhood.
Here is the way this line of thinking unfolds. The body, being mortal, does not endure. Over time, its health and functioning declines and eventually it perishes. Another idea often goes with this view—namely, that the body, because it dies and thus remains imperfect, is tied to evil. The body thus has little value, at least when held alongside of the soul.
Not so for the soul, this same way of thinking continues. The soul is superior to the body; and it’s superior because it endures and especially because it serves as the means for salvation—that is, for one’s eternal life with God. As a result, the soul has the potential for reaching perfection—if not in the present life, then in the next one. A consequence of this prevailing view of souls has been that whereas it has been highly valued and attended to in theological reflection and in the Christian life, the body has been devalued if not discounted altogether. In a common Christian way of speaking, “If your soul is right with God, nothing else matters all that much!” (Cole, 2008c, 12).
Moltmann suggests an alternative view. He points to the creation story and notes that it says: “‘God breathed his breath into the lump of the earth,’ so that the first human being, ‘Adam,’ ‘became a living soul’ (Gen. 2:7, KJV). That means ‘he does not have a living soul. He is a living soul’” (Moltmann, 1985, 256). Similarly, Moltmann adds, Martin Luther understood that a person who dies “can lament: ‘I am encompassed by death, I am flesh,’ which means ‘He does not possess his flesh. He is flesh’” (Moltmann, 1985, 12). Body and soul together make the person.
The writer Wendell Berry (1992) holds a similar view. He calls the dualistic thinking that grounds the modern mind “the most destructive disease that afflicts us,” and he observes further that the dualism of body and soul remains the most “dangerous” and “fundamental” version of it. Berry writes:
God did not make a body and put a soul into it, like a letter into an envelope. He formed man of dust; then, by breathing His breath into it, He made the dust live. The dust, formed as man and made to live, did not embody a soul; it became a soul. “Soul” here refers to the whole creature. Humanity is thus present to us, in Adam, not as a creature of two discrete parts temporarily glued together but as a single mystery (106).
But this dualistic thinking is common in my experience, and especially in the church. In one of Berry’s (2000) novels, a young man by the name of Jayber Crow reflects on this common way of thinking:
I took to studying the ones of my teachers who were also preachers, and also the preachers who came to speak in chapel at my various exercises. In most of them I saw the old division of body and soul I had [long known]. . . . Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body were really divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins—hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust—came from the soul. But those preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh of the world. And yet those same people believed in the resurrection of the body (49).
With Moltmann and Berry, I think of “the soul” as the whole person, in his or her entirety, in relationship to the living God. Consequently, I want to stress two matters of soul-care. First, we should think of personhood in terms of the body, mind, and soul existing in what Moltmann calls “reciprocal relation” and “mutual interpenetration” (Moltmann, 1985, 257). People are embodied souls and soulful bodies, if you will. Second, and related, the term soul denotes not part of a person that relates to God but rather the whole person in relationship to the living God, whether in life or death. A person is a soul. A soul is a person.6