Mapping the terrain of pastoral theology: Toward a practical theology of care

Mapping the Terrain of Pas tora l Theology: Toward a Pract ica l Theo logy of Care

Don S. Browning Divinity School, University of Chicago

Disciplines occasionally should pause in the midst of their pursuits to clarify their methods and map the terrain that they propose to tra- vel. Such moments of self-clarification and reorientation are inher- ently ambiguous and potentially dangerous. As a colleague once said, "A map is not the territory." Therefore, It is possible for any traveler to become so preoccupied with charting the course of one's journey that one never has time to actually make the trip. In the theological disciplines, this happens when questions of method overwhelm questions of substance to such a degree that their practitioners never get beyond questions of prolegomena. For this to happen in any theological discipline is lamentable; for it to happen with the practical and pastoral genres of theology is disastrous.

It is safe to say, however, that methodological preoccupation has not been a sin that the pastoral and practical theologies have committed with frequency in modern times. In fact, the problem may be just the reverse. Fundamenta l and systematic theologians charge that practical theologians have spent too little time with such concerns and have opted instead for immediate relevance to the pressing needs of humans. Some say that Christian witness, theological precision, cultural and situational analysis, ideology critique, and the proper use of cognate disciplines in the social sciences all have been sacrificed in the name of immediate and short-term relief of human and social suffering. We need not accept or reject these charges to acknowledge that some energy spent mapping the subject matter, the goals, and the methods of pastoral and practical theology should have a healthy effect on our practice as long as we do not become fixated at this level of re-

Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 36(1), Fall 1987 1 0 �9 1987 Human Sciences Press

Don S. Browning 11

flection. It should help clarify our status in the academy, determine our relation to the secular helping disciplines, guide and formulate re- search, position pastoral representatives of the church in relation to other institutions in complex modern societies, better describe the situation of people in need of pastoral ministries, and deepen our understanding of the logic and limits of the cognate fields of knowledge such as psychology, sociology, and philosophy that tend to inform our pastoral theologies. Disciplines of practice in modern societies such as law, medicine, social work, etc. are informed by complex and sophisticated bodies of theory which both serve to legitimate their practices before the larger society and to guide actual performance. I will argue that pastoral theology should be such a complex discipline in our t ime and in the kind of society in which we live.

In the map that follows, I will set out al ternative positions on a variety of issues about which I believe that the pastoral and practical theologies need to be relatively clear in order to do their work. My re- marks should be taken as basically illustrative and suggestive ra ther than definitive. Each of the issues I will discuss are momentous in their proportions and cannot be satisfactorily resolved in the few para- graphs I will dedicate to them. In addition to discussing alternatives, I will briefly state my position. To get beyond the air of dogmatism and pseudo-certainty that often plague such highly condensed efforts to map a theological enterprise, I will also reveal some of my lingering self-doubts about the options that I support.

The position I will t ry to develop aspires to present pastoral theology as a discipline justifiable within both the secular university and the denominational seminary. I will argue that it takes no special re treat to publicly inaccessible forms of faith or revelation to justify the credi- bility of the pastoral theologies in either the university or the seminary. I will fur ther argue that if pastoral theology cannot justify itself in the university or the state or community college, it may not be able to justify its ministries of care and counseling in the clinic, the hospital, or the counseling center. Furthermore, unless it can justify itself as a discipline in the academy it will sooner or later lose its credi- bility in the give and take of the secular and pluralistic communities that increasingly characterize both Britain and the United States. In what follows I will address two of several issues fundamental to what I will call "a practical theology of care" - -namely , the scope of such a discipline and its possible methods. Other important issues, particularly the important question of the theory-practice dialectic, will be touched on in passing, but not fully addressed.

12 Pastoral Psychology

Pastora l Theo logy or a Pract ica l Theo logy of Care

I suggest that efforts to state the methodological foundations of pastoral theology can profitably begin with Seward Hiltner's 1958 volume entitled Preface to Pastoral Theology. It stands as one of the few serious twentieth century attempts to define the scope and method of pastoral theology. Hiltner believed that the history of the term pastoral theology reveals two usages. One was the broad or inclusive use of the term associated with Zwingli's The Shepherd. This view equated pastoral theology with the theology of all the acts the pastor does in discharging her or his ministry. (Hiltner, 1958, 15) The second usage is more restricted: it is the theology of the specifically shepherding functions of the pastor, the acts of "tender and solicitous concern for the person or group" with whom the pastor is dealing. (Ibid. 15-16) Hiltner's contribution to a reformulated definition of pastoral theology was to relativ- ize both of these definitions by, in effect, combining them. Hiltner pro- posed to define pastoral theology as a field of theological inquiry that "brings the shepherding perspective to bear upon all the operations and functions of the church and the minister." (Ibid. 20) This view paid tribute to the more inclusive definition by acknowledging that pastoral theology could in principle apply to all pastoral acts (homiletics, liturgics, catechetics, etc.), but it also sided with the more restricted definition by saying that pastoral theology dealt principally with the shepherding potential of these acts.

This influential and creative definition of the scope of pastoral theology warrants two comments. First, it tended to capture pastoral theology within the framework of what Edward Farley has recently called the "clerical paradigm." Second, it left Hiltner, and I believe his followers, with an ambiguous attitude toward the broader theological discipline of practical theology--a broader genre of theology within which for most of the nineteenth and twentieth century pastoral theology had been placed.

With regard to the first comment, it should be noted that Alistair Campbell was one of the first to point out forcefully that Hiltner, on the whole, tended to limit his formal definitions of pastoral theology to the acts of care performed by ordained ministers. (Campbell, 1972) This tended to limit pastoral theology to reflection on the caring acts of the professional minister (and even then generally within the confines of the congregation) and to exclude from its interest the more inclusive range of activity on the part of the congregation or the wider Christian community in their general caring ministries in the world. Although

Don S. Browning 13

Hiltner certainly had an interest in these larger ministries of care in the world, his explicit definitions of pastoral theology tended to focus on the caring potential of various professional ministerial acts, as Rod- ney Hunter recently has appeared to acknowledge (Hunter, 1985, 32, 33).

In view of these observations, it is fair to say that on the whole Hilt- ner's understanding of pastoral theology was confined to what Farley has called the clerical paradigm. By this, Farley means to refer to the clericalization in most Protestant circles of the entire body of divinity from the time of Schleiermacher to the present. Schleiermacher earned a place for theology in the modern university by defining the classical theological disciplines in terms of their teleological contribution to practical theology. (Farley, 1983a,26; 1983b, 85) Practical theology as the queen of the theological sciences was seen as theological reflection on the profession of the ordained ministry. For Schleiermacher, theology- inc lud ing the practical disciplines--was a "positive science in the same sense as medicine and law" and had as much right to be in the modern university as did these other two professional disciplines (Ibid. 1983b, 88; Schleiermacher, 1830, 1966).

Although Schleiermacher's powerful solution to the unity of theology earned a place for this discipline in the modern university, it did this at the cost of making theology--especially practical theology--a reflective process done by and for ministers basically for their voca- tional needs. Hiltner, as did most of those writing on pastoral theology during the century that preceded him, fell within this tradition. This was probably true, although I cannot argue it here, of the other major figures who presided over pastoral theology in the United States during the 1950's and 1960's such as Wayne Oates, Carroll Wise, Paul Johnson and later Howard Clinebell.

Hiltner's confinement of pastoral theology to the clerical paradigm is related to his ambiguous attitude toward the category of practical theology. Hiltner was aware that pastoral theology as the shepherding perspective on ministerial acts did not exhaust the whole of ministry. In fact, he made creative contributions to our conception of the interac- tion between the shepherding perspective and the two other perspectives he called communication and organization. Hiltner was also aware that in the theological encyclopedia of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, these cognate disciplines such as religious education, homiletics, and liturgics were organized within practical theology, not unlike the way Schleiermacher envisioned them in the Brief Outline.


On the whole, however, Hil tner tended to take a negative at t i tude toward the idea of organizing the totali ty of what he called the "cognate" disciplines of ministry under the rubric of practical theology. Al- though the idea of a practical theology did have the virtue of recogniz- ing the existence of what he called "operation-centered" theological disciplines, he ends in saying that he did not "believe there can be a master perspective on acts and operations that would swallow all the others, anymore than there can be a master perspective in the logic- centered fields" of Bible, historical theology, or theological ethics. This ambivalent at t i tude toward the possibility of establishing the generic features of a practical theological method that would have relevance for and give unity to all of the disciplines of ministerial praxis left Hil tner with a strong and positive program for pastoral theology but a rather vague understanding of the kind of theological genre to which the rest of ministerial praxis rightly belongs.

Against the background of these historical notes, allow me to advance an alternative model to Hiltner and his nineteenth and twentieth century predecessors. I believe it is better to conceive of a discipline known as the practical theology of care that would contain within it as a subdimension a pastoral theology of the shepherding perspective. Such a discipline would organize our theologies of care within more inclusive models of theological praxis that would at tempt to bring coherent and unifying practical theological methodologies to all the regions of the church's praxis in the world--educat ion, liturgy, religious rhetoric and preaching, and care. With regard to the region of care, a practical theology of care would at tempt to formulate a theology of the norms, goals, procedures, theological justifications and strategies for all the church's programs of care. This would take what has traditionally been called pastoral theology beyond the clerical paradigm, although it would not exclude that paradigm. The task of a practical theology of care would be to develop a practical theology for a wide range of issues of care that the church should address in its ministry to the world.

I will i l lustrate by selecting a topic that has been noticeably ne- glected by the theological writings in the United States. For instance, not only would it address such topics as the ordained pastor's care of the family (the clerical paradigm), it might advance a practical theology of family life in modern societies or even a practical theology of the ecumenical strategy of the church in influencing and shaping family life in the public world in American or British or indeed Western in- dustrial societies.

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Notice, for instance, how this latter t op i c - - an American or British ecumenical s trategy for the formation of family l i fe - -would entail theological and praxis issues of an entirely different kind than is usu- ally associated with pastoral theology when under the captivity of the clerical paradigm. It might raise questions about the situation of the modern family. It might raise questions dealing with the church's image of the good family, not just the good Christian family but the good family among those who are not specifically Christian. Can there be, for instance, a theologically grounded image of the family that would be applicable to basic aspects of the family in civic society, regardless of its Christian allegiance? Can there be denominational or ecumenical strategies that are theologically articulate for influencing families both inside and outside the church? Such topics are clearly praxis topics, but they may not be confined to psychotherapeutic or counseling models of practice of the kind that have so dominated pastoral theology captured by the clerical paradigm (although they certainly would not exclude them). But such issues could more natural ly be addressed by a broader practical theology of care, a theology that could in principle sponsor the theological investigation into the formation, counseling, and theology of the Christian family as well.

There is no reason why a practical theology of care cannot claim as its subject mat ter policy issues in care as well as the more intimate mat ters of person to person or small group pastoral care. In fact, theological investigation into the latter, which we might properly call the subject mat ter of the more limited discipline of pastoral theology, cannot position itself on social-structural matters unless pursued within a larger practical theology of care that is addressing more encompassing social systemic and policy issues in care. This is a point I have tried to make in both The Moral Context of Pastoral Care (1976) and Religious Ethics and Pastoral Care (1983). Using a different language, it was a point that Robert Bonthius (1967) in the United States and Robert Lambourne (1963) in England made in the 1960's. And it is a point that Mansell Patt ison (1977), Archie Smith (1982), and Alistair Camp- bell (1984) have all made in different ways with even greater force in recent years. Yet none of them, except perhaps Campbell (1972), should be held responsible for making the point that I am recommend- ing here, i.e., that the individual and the social structural dimensions of the church's care can be better related if we develop a more encompassing discipline of a practical theology of care within which a pastoral theology of professional ministerial care would be a highly important but subordinate moment.


The dangers connected with developing a practical theology of care that would include, but go beyond the clerical, paradigm is that such a discipline could lose contact with the cultus and inner history of the worshipping and practicing Christian congregation. It might lose its foundations in vital religious experience and in the fresh telling and retelling of the Christian story that flows forth from the inner core of religious communities. It might become so abstracted from the inner rhythms of congregations that ordained ministers would feel poorly equipped to handle the immediacies of face to face contact with the ill, the suffering, the troubled, the confused, and the doubtful.

It is not my interest to erase the progress in the United States and Britain that have generally occurred in enriching ministers' skills in counseling and the more intimate quarters of pastoral care. My goal, instead, is to broaden both their vision of care and the range of skills required to perform it. I also hope that more and more ministers will learn to focus on the care of the congregation and the care of the laity, both for one another within the congregation and for the world around the congregation. In this newer model, ministers and other church leaders would be educated to become practical theologians of care. They would need skills in facilitating congregational deliberations about needed strategies for care both within the local church and in the world around it. These ministers and leaders would need skills in creating a community of care with the relational skills to be effectively present to one another. The minister would need intellectual skills to understand how theology, sociology, and psychology can come together to develop practical diagnoses and strategies to address family issues, drug abuse, urban loneliness, divorce, aging, and work.

I agree with the proposals of Joseph Hough and John Cobb in their excellent recent book entitled Christian Identity and Theological Edu- cation. (1985) They advocate the image of the minister as practical theologian as a new model that would help the minister lead the congregation but, at the same time, function to stimulate the laity of the congregation to become involved in practical ministries in the public arena beyond the church (Cobb and Hough, 1985, 90-94). Hough and Cobb would use the image of minister as practical theologian (and as reflective practitioner) to replace the most recent dominant images in the United States of minister as manager and minister as counselor. (Ibid. 15-16.) It is interesting to note that, according to Robert Bellah, the images of the manager and the therapist have also become the dominant images throughout the culture, especially in business and industry. (Bellah, 198, 44-46, 47-48) Before these images emerged

Don S. Browning 17

with such great prominence in the 1960's and 70's, Cobb and Hough point to the prominence in the 40's and 50's of the image of the minister as pastoral director and the minister as builder. (Cobb and Hough, 13-15) During the early decades of the century in the United States, the images of the minister as revivalist and pulpiteer were widely popu- lar. It is my conviction that if the image of the minister as practical theologian was used to st imulate the praxis of the Christian community, including the practices of care, efforts would be made to take seriously the requirements of congregational leadership, yet go beyond this to a clearer understanding of the theory and practice of the laity's caring ministries within the congregation and for the surrounding world.

I can illustrate my point here by briefly sharing the tentat ive results of an informal study that my students and I did on what we called "congregational care." (Browning, 1985) We were interested in learning how ministers and congregational leaders thought theologically about the congregation's care in contrast to the minister's pastoral care. We learned that church members valued far more the care that they re- ceived from each other than they did the care from the minister, although they did indeed value ministerial care in moments of crisis and transition. The ministers who seemed able to st imulate a vibrant mutual care in their congregations possessed a wide range of skills beyond those needed for their own counseling and caring ministries. In addition, when the inquiry was aimed at the congregation's care rather than the minister's, unique congregational styles of care were discern- ible that were worth understanding in themselves. For instance, many congregations wish to be like families in their care for one another. But just what being a caring family meant greatly varied among these churches depending upon their respective interpretations of their contexts. For instance, a universi ty church deeply involved in social ac- tion thought of its care as supporting the activism of the family of God. A declining suburban church thought of its care as maintaining the family of God. Another suburban church full of upwardly mobile mid- dle-class families saw its care primarily as creating a family of God out of autonomous individual members. A large, rather anonymous urban congregation with little sense of community saw its care as at tempting to discover and enhance an inner caring elite of the family of God who in turn might reach out to the larger amorphous congregational mass. A new Asian congregation full of immigrants saw its care as attempt- ing to establish the family of God through a variety of instrumental acts designed to find jobs, teach the English language, and help with fi-


nances. In each case, the minister's practical theological vision, or lack of it, of the church's context set the stage for the pat tern and style of care found both in the congregation and in the congregation's relation to the world.

Theological Method for a Practical Theology of Care

To move from a preoccupation with pastoral theology, whether narrowly or broadly defined, to a practical theology of care, does not necessitate a repudiation of pastoral theology. Nor does it mean, necessarily, a repudiation of the clerical paradigm. Theological reflection on the shepherding perspective of professional ministry would still very much be an important theological agenda. There is a crucial role for such books as Thomas C. Oden's Pastoral Theology (1983) and many of the other important books writ ten from this perspective in recent years. But a wider perspective on the church's care, less dominated by the clerical paradigm, is now in order.

Placing pastoral theology within a larger practical theology of care opens the possibility of developing more generalized practical theological methods which would be relevant to all of the practical theological disciplines of the church--educat ion, liturgy, personal and social ethics, administration, and care. A concern with method for pastoral theology without searching for the continuities in method among all the practical theological disciplines tends to isolate theological reflection on care from theological reflection on the entire range of the church's practices. Hil tner was skeptical of the usefulness of an encompassing discipline of practical theology because he feared that it would be subject to the standard theory-practice dichotomy that had customarily plagued the theological encyclopedias of the nineteenth century. (Hilt- ner, 24) But this need not be the case. Establishing a practical theological method and properly stating the theory-practice relation are issues that education, ethics, liturgy, and preaching also have to face. There is no reason to believe that their various solutions should be un- related. Furthermore, there is much to gain for the overall sense of unity of ministerial and congregational practice if theological methods common to all these enterprises are gradually discovered.

But where should we turn? Where can we find a valid method for practical theology in general and a practical theology of care in particular? There have been at least three prominent alternatives that have gained populari ty on the American scene. There has been the neo-

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orthodox Barthian model exemplified by Eduard Thurneysen's A The- ology of Pastoral Care (1962), the correlational model advanced by Paul Tillich, and the revised correlational model advanced by David Tracy and myself (Tracy, 1983; Browning, 1981, 1983a, 1983b). I like to believe that the American theologians Daniel Day Williams and Seward Hil tner were giving voice to a revised correlational model of practical theology as well (Williams, 1948; Hiltner, 1958, 222-224).

In the United States, the stricter forms of the neo-orthodox theology of the Word have had little influence on practical theological method with the exception, perhaps, of the powerful work of Thomas Oden (Oden, 1966, 1982, 1983). This is true, I believe, because of its general disdain for interdisciplinary work and for its rather inflexible "Christ against culture" stance toward the secular healing resources of modern societies. Ministers in these churches in the United States are generally convinced that there is something to learn for the church's care from the psychological and social sciences but find little help from the narrower neo-orthodox theology in conceptualizing just what their contributions might be.

Tillich's correlational model for systematic theology was suggestive for practical theology, but was really not developed in this direction by either Tillich or his followers. (Tillich, 1951, 3 -6 , 59-66) Tillich believed systematic theology must proceed by correlating existential questions that come from an adequate description of various life situations with theological answers that come from revelation and the central events of the Christ ian tradition. The strong emphasis upon an adequate description of situations certainly makes Tillich's method of correlation suggestive for all theologies of praxis. Yet Hiltner, al though frequently associated with Tillich's method of correlation, was actually critical of it. Hil tner believed that there was more to be gained from the description of the situational, experiential, and cultural pole of theological reflection than merely a deeper understanding of the existential questions which should be brought to the central Christ ian witness. In the footnotes to his Preface to Pastoral Theology he wrote,

We believe that a full two-way street is necessary in order to describe theological method. If we hold that theology is always assimilation of the faith, not just the abstract idea of the faith apart from its reception, then it becomes necessary to say that culture may find answers to questions raised by faith as well as to assert that faith has answers to questions raised by culture. (Hiltner, 1958, 223)


In this quote, in spite of its many imprecisions, Hil tner is struggling toward what today several of us are calling a revised correlational method.

In the revised correlational method, Christian theology and cultural experience enter into a mutual ly critical correlation. When this method is used to clarify the practical theologies, it becomes a mat ter of correlating the implications for practice of the central events of the Christian faith with the implications for practice of various expressions of individual and cultural visions and ideologies. This view starts out with a description of practices. This could be the practice of the minister in caring for a member of the congregation, the practice of the social worker, the practice of the business person, or the practice of the therapist. This description of practice asks two kinds of questions. First it asks, what is the nature of this practice and what is the theory behind this practice? Second, it asks what should be the practice in this situation, especially if one were to bring the perspectives of the Chris- t ian faith upon it? This latter question then leads one backward into a hermeneutical conversation with the central events of the Christian faith and what they might imply for the questions about practice com- ing forth from the practice being reviewed.

Hence, a revised correlational approach to practical theology is a hermeneutical approach to practical theology. It entails a hermeneutical conversation between descriptions of present practices with the implications for practice of the central events of the Christian faith. The hermeneutical approach to practical theology assumes that the practical theologian is a radically historical and finite religious thinker who has risked a t rust in the importance for contemporary praxis of the fundamental features of a particular religious tradition. The practical theologian believes that the transformative power of the tradition has its best possibilities of producing its changes if it is al- lowed to witness in relation to a full description of the going practices and the theories behind them. But several important additional features can be added to describe what the revised correlational method- ology as a hermeneutical approach to practical theology might be like.

1. The correlations that may exist between present practices and the practice implications of normative events of the Christian faith can take one of three forms. The correlation might be one of identity, of complete nonidentity or dissimilarity, or one of analogy (Tracy, 1983, 63). This can be the case whether we are having a hermeneutical conversation between normative Christian practices and either present- day secular or religious practices of various kinds.

Don S. Browning 21

I can il lustrate what is meant by this range of possible correlations with reference to the similarities and differences between various forms of pastoral care within the history of the church and certain modern forms of secular psychotherapy. Some forms of allegedly secular psychotherapy seem, if not identical, clearly analogous in both basic presuppositions and techniques to certain classic forms of Christian care, as has been observed by a great host of contemporary commenta- tors. On the other hand, various expressions of modern psychotherapy seem to be vastly dissimilar to classic forms of Christian care. The revised correlational method in practical theology invites a hermeneutic conversation between all forms of contemporary care and the practice implications of various classic forms of Christian care.

2. In contrast to Tillich's method, the revised model sees the correlational process as a far more open conversation. Whereas Tillich spoke of correlating the questions from the existential situation with the answers from Christian revelation, David Tracy speaks of correlations "between both the questions and the responses of both phenom- ena, the Christian tradition and the contemporary situation, not simply 'questions' from one pole and 'responses' from the other" (Tracy, 83, 63). Hence, the conversation must finally be critical. This means that we start with our preunderstandings about good practice, return to a deeper confrontation with the Christian witness, and then finally have a critical conversation between the two poles about the meaning of good practice.

I must make my point with care. I am speaking here about method in developing a self-consciously responsible and critical practical theology of care. I am not speaking about pastoral practice as such. Pastoral practice may only occasionally entail a critical conversation between these poles of situation and message, although this may happen im- plicitly more than we admit. The way Charles Gerkin and Don Capps have described the hermeneutical conversation and interpretative task in pastoral practice is instructive, although neither, it seems to me, emphasize the critical moment in that conversation as I am sug- gesting here. Nor is either primarily addressing the issue of method in a practical theology of care in contrast to method in pastoral practice. (Gerkin, 1984; Capps, 1984) I am speaking of practical theology as an academic process of developing a fund of critically tested meanings about practice. Because our practical theologies aspire to inform practice, we frequently get practice and the critical theological task confused. Fearful of disconnecting theory and practice, we give up doing theory at all. This leads, I am afraid, to an eventual impoverishment of


practice. To illustrate my point, Christians must be willing to have a hermeneutical and critical conversation with Marxists about both their questions and their answers. This critical task should be distin- guished from the activity involved in actually joining with Marxists in a variety of cooperative ventures, although it may well be that the former critical task is essential for the possibility of the latter.

3. The critical correlational model is especially important for deter- mining the relation between practical theology and the psychological and social sciences. Although it is widely believed that the social sciences are indispensable for practical theology in our time, it is not entirely clear as to why this is the case. Nor do we have adequate tools for analyzing the normative ethical and quasi-religious horizons of the social sciences which quietly shape our values as well as help us describe our situations. The revised correlational method in practical theology is particularly helpful in not only discerning the normative fringe of the social sciences but in leading us into a critical conversation designed to evaluate the relative adequacy of the metaphysical and moral commitments of these sciences in relation to the Christian witness.

It is commonly thought that the modern psychologies help us discern the psychobiological inclinations, tendencies, and needs which we bring to experience. They help us, to use the suggestive phrase of Paul Ricoeur, discern the "archeology of the subjec t" - - the fund of desires and inclinations which shape, but not necessarily determine, the reflective processes of the ego (Ricoeur, 1970, 419-20). It is good for practical theology to have ways of knowing these desires, both on the basis of theoretical models of them as various psychologies provide and through direct experience of the voice of des i re - - i t s frustrations and d isappoin tments - -as it is expressed in the person to person interview, the counseling situation, and other moments of care. In addition, our clinical psychologies provide us concepts and tools of description to help us understand how our desires become elaborated into typical patterns. At the same time, our sociologies give us accounts of how various material conditions such as work patterns, economic trends, class structure and the like also shape and incline our reflection.

In each case, you will have noticed, I did not speak about how psychological desires or material social forces determine our behavior. I spoke, instead, about how they incline our reflection, using the word "reflection" to protect the idea that, in spite of the multiple condition- ing forces which play upon our lives, most social actors must be under- stood as centers of reflection with degrees of freedom that make it

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possible to understand more about themselves, psychologically and so- ciologically, than these disciplines themselves often seem to allow. In this we should agree with Jurgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens over against certain representations of Marx and Freud in the former two's belief that most social actors are centers of reflection with some awareness of the psychological and social forces that function to limit their freedom (Habermas, 1971, 301-317; Giddens, 1985, 125). In this sense, our practical theologies of care should use the psychological and social sciences to inform reflection, both that of the theologian and that of the subjects of the church's ministry. Psychology and sociology (and other such social sciences) help us name and conceptualize the conditions and determinants that limit, but not necessarily extinguish, our freedom.

In this sense these sciences become tools in the hands of practical theology for the transformation of life and the increase of freedom. Our systematic theologies should give us our visions and ideals for the kind of world we want to inhabit. Our theological ethics should add to these visions general moral principles such as neighbor love and justice with which to order and adjudicate conflicting desires, needs, and interests. Images of the goodness of creation, the ambiguity and sinfulness of life, the possibilities of redemption, and the principles of the moral life, are what our systematic and moral theologies should contribute to the practical theological task. But our theologies do not become genuinely practical until these religious visions and moral principles are filled out with both theoretical and experiential situational knowledge of how concrete human needs are manifesting themselves in particular contexts and how certain social forces are functioning in these contexts to support or rob us of our freedom to effectively, justly, and redemp- tively pursue basic human needs on behalf of the global human community.

But the psychological and sociological sciences give more to our practical theologies than they should and more than we sometimes ask. Let me illustrate this with reference to the modern psychologies. Permit me to refer to material in a book I have just finished entitled Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies (Browning, 1986). In this book I argue that all of the modern clinical psychologies are mixed disciplines, i.e. disciplines that mix genuinely explanatory or descriptive psychological language with languages that are logically of a moral and even religious kind. If this is true, our psychological sciences do not simply offer us descriptive accounts of our desires and their existential patterns; they give us implicit religious orientations,


world views, and ethics as well. Hence, our psychologies become religioethical alternatives or complements to our Christian theologies.

In the categories of the revised correlational approach to practical theology, our clinical psychologies as cultural practices can be correlated with the Christian witness in a variety of ways. The correlation can be one of identity, analogy, or nonidentity. Interestingly, according to my reading, most of these psychologies have an analogous relation to the Christian witness. This should not be surprising since these psychologies have evolved out of a culture shaped by Jewish and Chris- tian symbols and ethics and have doubtless carried much of this religioethical context into their conceptualization. Paul Halmos showed some years ago how modern social work carries forth Jewish and Christian ideas (Halmos, 1966), and recently Lewis Brandt (1982), Vidich and Lyman (1985) and Clarence Karier (1986) have argued this point with regard to a broad range of the psychological and social sciences.

A strictly scientific psychology, if such a thing is conceivable, cannot properly be correlated or compared with a religious or theological view of life. The language of scientific psychology simply functions on a different level. Psychology explains and describes human behavior; it tries to give causal accounts of human activity or describe certain pervasive empirical patterns. Theology, on the other hand, aspires to in- terpret the meaning and destiny of human behavior, especially with regard to some ultimate frame of reference. Although this is the way one might ideally distinguish scientific psychology from theology, in reality few psychologies, and certainly not the clinical psychologies, stay within these narrow and humble limits.

Although most of the respected modern clinical psychologies contain concepts that are at least logically of a type that one might call scientific, they also contain other concepts which function as deep metaphors about the way the world really is. These deep metaphors are over-generalized scientific models that function to account not only for discrete areas of clinical data but also to orient the users of these psychologies to larger frameworks of meaning about life (Barbour, 1974, 29-48; Browning, 1986, 16-17). Such over-generalized models can be found in the metaphor of eros and the death instinct in the later writings of Freud and the pervasive metaphors of harmony that run throughout the writings of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Fritz Perls (Browning, 1986, 28-45, 53-80). One finds them in the metaphors of reinforcement and natural selection in the dogmatic behaviorism of

Don S. Browning 25

B.F. Skinner and his explicit comparison in his biography of these se- lective forces with the providential power of a Calvinistic God (Skin- ner, 1984, 402-03). In spite of the surface psycho-ontological dualism in the writings of Jung, I find deeper metaphors of harmony, not unlike those of the humanist ic psychologies, in his writings as well (Ibid. 138-74). These harmonistic images of the world can be found even in the psychology of the self of the later Heinz Kohut. (Ibid. 175- 203) To a lesser degree, and in a far more complicated form, they can be found in the writ ings of Erik Erikson (Ibid.).

Wherever metaphors of harmony are to be found in the modern clinical psychologies, one finds an implicit ethic that moves toward what moral philosophers would call philosophical ethical egoism. The images of the world as basically a ha rmony- -pe rhaps even a perfectly self-balancing organism--funct ion to justify and legitimate this ethical egoism. It is easiest to demonstrate how this works with the humanist ic psychologies of Rogers, Maslow, and Perls. It has been observed by Franck (1977), Yankelovich (1981), Norton (1976), and Browning (1980, 195-208;1984, 153) that the concept of health built on the model of self-actualization doubles in the humanistic psychologies as an image of ethical fulfillment. The language of these psychologies frequently shifts from describing self-actualization as a model for heal th to prescribing it as a state that all humans should aspire to reach. As an ideal of character, moral philosophers would quickly tell us self-actualization is a species of nonhedonistic ethical egoism. It seems to suggest tha t all humans in order to be healthy should ac- tualize their own unique potentials first. William Frankena tells us, however, that ethical egoists, in an effort to handle the problem of conflicting self-actualizations, generally posit a world of "pre-established harmony" that, in effect, denies that genuine self-actualizations can actually contradict one another (1973, 19). David Norton explicitly takes this position with his concept of "congeniality of excellence" in his philosophy of ethical individualism (40, 306-09). I find the same structure implicit throughout the harmonistic deep metaphors of the humanist ic psychologies of Maslow, Rogers, and Perls. I even find a variat ion of this relation between an implicit metaphysics of harmony and an ethics of self-actualization in the psychology of Jung (Brown- ing, 1986, 138-74).

But the relation between the deep metaphors and the implicit ethic in Freud, Skinner, Kohut and Erikson assume different pat terns which I cannot take time to illustrate here. Nor can I il lustrate compa-


rable ways in which various modern sociologies contain in and around their conceptuality similar deep quasi-religious metaphors and ethical principles. My point is simply to say that in using the psychological and social sciences, the practical theologian of care also must be ready to have a revised correlational dialogue with the normative horizons of these disciplines. For instance, the harmonistic metaphors of the humanistic psychologies clearly correlate analogically with the harmonistic metaphors of the Christian doctrine of creation and the idea that salvation, however conceived, in some ways fulfills creation. But the Christian vision and story has genuine room for dynamics of dishar- mony due to the disruptions of sin and misused freedom. These disruptions require moral seriousness on the part of humans and both moral governance and grace on the part of God for this harmony to be re- stored. There is a moral realism in the Christian story that is absent in the humanist ic psychologies and the related psychologies which feed from their basic concepts and visions. To use these psychologies in our ministries of health (both secular and religious) requires a critical conversation with the normative horizon of these psychologies of a kind we have declined to pursue vigorously in the past. To use psychoanaly- sis, analytic psychology, behaviorism, object relations theory, or the new American psychologies of the self (and there may be good reasons to use all of these for particular issues in health and growth), should entail a critical conversation of the kind I i l lustrated in the case of humanistic psychology. But the conversation must be genuinely revised and mutual ly critical. Jus t because a particular social science or particular cultural expression does not have striking analogies with the Christian witness does not mean that by default its vision and ethics are wrong or inadequate. To demonstrate this, our practical theologies must be willing to enter into a critical conversation, both metaphysical and ethical, about the relative adequacy of these alternative forms of life and their associated principles of obligation.

But this critical conversation that a practical theology must have with the social sciences that it uses for its situational analyses is not the whole of its task. There is a component, indeed, to any practical theology that we might call a "critical theology of culture" of the kind I have jus t illustrated. But it is the task of a practical theology of care to move beyond this moment and to develop theories of practice that have developed dialectically in relation to situations of actual practice. All of this is designed to inform the church's concrete mission and practice of care in the world.

Don S. Browning 27

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Documents

Mapping the terrain of pastoral theology: Toward a practical theology of care