On Scripture and Pastoral Care

with some help from seventeenth century Zürich

I heard an interesting conference paper two weeks ago about the use of the Bible in pastoral care by Zürich pastors in the seventeenth century. The presenter was trying to piece together how pastors actually used the Bible when dealing with suffering or questioning or publicly sinful parishioners, and how parishioners responded to this use of Scripture. It’s a complicated and interesting question, made more difficult by the lack of source material; it’s easier to explore how church leaders and theologians wanted parish pastors to use the Scripture in pastoral care than to sort out how it actually worked in practice. But although the talk was purely historical and non-normative in focus, it nonetheless got me thinking about its implications pastoral practice today. Because it was very clear that these Zürich ministers did in fact use Scripture to teach, to admonish, to call to repentance, to comfort, to console in a way that I fear the mainline church has largely lost the ability to do.

I don’t think this loss of ability is accidental. Rather, it flows clearly from mainline Christianity’s rejection of or at least ambivalence towards two key claims upon which such use of Scripture depends. First, that good pastoral care is theologically normative, grounded in specifically Christian beliefs and aimed at specifically Christian ends. Second, that Scripture is a primary means by which the Holy Spirit creates communion between God and human beings.

As I’ve written before, the dominant model of pastoral care in the mainline is typically provided by Clinical Pastoral Education, a hospital chaplaincy internship lasting a few months that most would-be ministers have to do. The training included in the internship generally stresses active listening, nonjudgmental presence, and a commitment to accompanying the people you are caring for in whatever decisions they may make. Now, the sort of basic interpersonal skills that CPE teaches or reinforces are indeed helpful ones for ministers to have. You do need to know how to present yourself in a way that makes people comfortable talking with you (the ‘non-anxious presence’), to listen without immediately jumping in with answers or solutions, to care for people who do or believe things with which you disagree. But we run into problems when this approach is seen as exhausting the meaning of pastoral care, rather than providing the basic technical skills that will enable you to be effective in providing such care.

First of all, I think it’s worth saying that the single unit of CPE that clergy get doesn’t actual give you the tools to carry out real institutional chaplaincy. To be an actual chaplain in a hospital or school or similar setting requires significant further training, training which does not reduce to the ideal of vague nonjudgmental affirmation that seminarians often come back from CPE with. It’s an old joke around seminaries that you can always tell when somebody is taking CPE, because they essentially lose the ability to interact with others like a normal person. Suddenly they can’t ask a direct question but instead say something like, “I want to invite you to share about xyz…” or can’t offer an opinion without trying to turn it around on the questioner. Most people grow out of these sorts of verbal tics or at least moderate them. Some do not. But – to underline the point – this is not in fact what actual nonsectarian institutional chaplaincy is; good hospital or school chaplains don’t do this.

What’s more, while I think that serving as a hospital or school chaplain in a nonsectarian setting is a beautiful and worthy calling, I think that this role is quite different from serving in congregational ministry. This is where the question of normativity or theological specificity comes in. Unlike hospital chaplains, say, who are charged to care for people of a variety of faiths (or none), often in short-term, emergency situations, pastors of congregations are charged with building people up in Christ over the long haul. We are charged, as the traditional Anglican ordinal puts it, “always so to minister the doctrine and sacraments, and the discipline of Christ…so that you may teach the people committed to your cure and charge with all diligence to keep and observe the same.” This means also that we are “to banish and drive away all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God's Word.” Our pastoral care is, or should be, inseparable from the doctrine we preach. But this position about the nature of pastoral care is something of a minority report in many mainline churches – and this is one of the reasons that the sort of Scriptural pastoral care the Zürich pastors carried out is difficult to imagine in many mainline settings today.

The other reason, then, has less to do with the understanding of pastoral care than with the understanding of Scripture. For the use of Scripture in pastoral care carries with it an assumption that Scripture, properly used, is an instrument the Spirit uses to transform human lives. This is not solely a Protestant belief – a fact which, given occasional Protestant caricatures of other Christian traditions’ approach to Scripture, is worth stressing – but it is particularly characteristic of Protestantism. As Article 5 of the Augsburg Confession puts it, “through the Word and sacraments as through instruments the Holy Spirit is given, who effects faith where and when it pleases God in those who hear the gospel.” The Second Helvetic Confession, to which these seventeenth-century Zürich preachers would have subscribed, is (characteristically for the Swiss Reformation) slightly more nervous about tying God’s work to external means. It takes pains to note that mere outward preaching without inner illumination by the Spirit profits nothing, and that God can illuminate people without the use of the external ministry. But this confession too affirms, citing Romans 10:17, that faith generally comes through the external ministry of Biblical preaching. The Scriptures are central, not just as a source of true information about God and what he has done for us (though they are certainly that!) but as something “living and active, sharper than any two-edge sword” (Heb 4:12), an instrument God uses to convict and nourish faith.

But once again, this is a view that has fallen on somewhat hard times in contemporary mainline settings. To be sure, you won’t generally see a simple rejection of Scripture, although one of my Old Testament professors at divinity school began his course by informing us that his goal as a teacher was to show us that the text was useless for moral or religious instruction. But you do see a certain nervousness about the authority and power of the Scriptural text. There’s a reticence to talk about it as an instrument of divine power, and instead an emphasis on the Bible as human creation (which, of course, it is in the sense that human beings wrote and transmitted it – but it is also more than this!). And perhaps above all, you get a sense that the Bible is something you need at least an MDiv to understand well, that it is not something accessible to ordinary believers but rather needs expertise to decode and use safely and responsibly. Indeed, you not infrequently hear that proper interpretation needs to be ceded to the academic Biblical studies guild. There is, of course, a profound irony in Protestants submitting to a new magisterium, alone authorized to pronounce reliably on Scripture’s meaning – and our Roman Catholic brethren in fact have it better than us, for they at least expect that the authorized interpreters of Scripture are confessing Christians!

And so, clergy might be inclined to turn to ‘ritual’ or ‘spiritual practices’ in providing pastoral care. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with either of these as a means of pastoral care (depending of course on what their specific content is). But you run the risk of missing the glorious truth that our God has spoken to us, has revealed himself to us via the Scriptures and made his self-revelation “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” Instead, too often, Scripture is marginalized (except perhaps for a few proof texts) as too difficult or ambiguous for regular use in building up Christians.

Now, I don’t mean to sound as though I think that proper pastoral care is simply giving people a list of Scriptural texts to read and trusting the Holy Spirit to do the rest, or to suggest that premodern pastoral care was perfect in all its forms. Of course not. But I do think that we could stand to repudiate the basically non-Christian accounts of both pastoral care and Biblical authority that are omnipresent in our contexts. I think we could stand to recover an understanding of both the pastoral task and the Bible that would lead us, like these seventeenth century Zürich pastors, to conduct pastoral care with a Bible in our hands, to use the marvelous gifts God has given us to build people up in faith, hope, and love. And I think this not just on the grounds of theological correctness, as it were, but also pastoral effectiveness: I have found that what actually has challenged me when I have fallen into sin and consoled me in times of despair is the words of Scripture. May God continue to use his words to bring us closer to him!