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"So what are you doing here?" The role of the minister of the gospel in hospital visitation, or a theological cure for the crisis in evangelical pastoral care
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2003 by Milton, Michael A
After Hiltner, the name of Dr. Howard Clinebell, who labored as Professor of Pastoral Psychology and Counseling at the School of Theology at Claremont, Claremont, California, must surely rank as the key teacher of these innovative ideas about the ordinary work of the pastor in cure of souls. There was nothing ordinary and certainly little that was biblical in this man's work. Clinebell, in his Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling (in the 1990 eighth printing of the 1966 original), which emerged as a primary textbook in pastoral counseling in many mainline seminaries, proposed that a key goal of a pastoral counselor was to help parishioners to "develop and cherish a nurturing interaction with our great mother-Mother Nature."13 Drawing from feminist theology, Clinebell encouraged an "androgynous wholeness" to the self as a goal of pastoral counselors.14 Clinebell is helpful to the evangelical only in this: he records the history of what he calls the "contemporary flowering of this ancient ministry . . ." [of cure of souls] by listing the chief pioneers.15 He includes "Richard Cabot, Anton Boisen, Philip Guiles, [and] Russell Dicks . . ."16 I say this is helpful to evangelicals, because in listing the names he exposes the progenitors of the false doctrines. Other than this, his textbook, which is grounded in psychology, feminist theology, and liberation theology, with limited references to Scripture and the casuistic practices of most of Christian history, the book has no value for the work of an evangelical minister. Yet, many evangelicals in mainline denominations were educated in it.
All of this is to say that there was enormous synergy between psychologists, philosophers, and psychiatrists and the modern pastoral care movement and thus potential enormous influence on those trained in it. Again, Thomas Oden, a theologian who at one time claimed the theology of Niebuhr and Tillich which undergirded the movement, but who later rejected it in favor of traditional evangelicalism, lists the following as major influencers on the modern pastoral care movement: "James (1897), Freud (d. 1939), Jung (1959ff), C. R. Rogers (1951, 1961), [and] . . . Menninger (1972)."17 Paul Vitz includes theorists and therapists such as Maslow, Skinner, Masters, and Johnson, Sanford, and Kohlberg. While these thinkers have shaped and influenced the pastoral care movement and consequently the seminary students who were trained under their adherents, I would add that the popular works of people like Wayne Dyer and Rollo May have no doubt had an impact as well on the approach of pastors to the work of cure of souls. There have been popular and scholarly works outlining a traditional evangelical criticism of this movement (see especially the works of Paul Vitz, Jay Adams, and the Bobgans).18 It is not my interest in this paper to pursue this criticism further. However, I raise the issue because the psychological-therapeutic movement in the modern pastoral care school has, if it has been integrated as a normative approach to pastoral care, been a chief contributor to an errant answer to our pressing question. The answer to the question, "So what are you doing here in my hospital room, pastor?" may be answered by practitioners of the modern pastoral care movement, "I am here just to listen." Or, if he is willing to stretch the Rogerian model a bit: "I am here to help you get in touch with yourself before this operation."
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