Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective

Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective is for use by members of the pastoral and healing professions as well as in seminaries and divinity schools as a manual for advanced training in pastoral arts. The authors bring into sharp focus the modern, self-conscious, critical, voluntaristic personality that has become the baffling versatile object of attention for the secular healing arts as well as for the contemporary practice of pastoral counseling. Pastoral care, viewed historically, touches interests that run both wider and deeper that the church and the ministry it sponsors. To care therapeutically for the modern personality involves philosophic as well as historic wisdom. It is emblematic of our day that psychotherapy leads from the comfortable confines of technical and strategic considerations of good craftsmanship into the arenas of uncertainty known as philosophy and ethics. Therapists, like pastors, today share with their clients great convictions about what is ultimately significant and worthy of final commitment. The four functions of the pastoral arts: sustaining, guiding, healing and reconciling, are powerfully operative today. These activities do not merely record the dimensions of therapy done by clergymen long ago and far away. Rather they signal what is happening, updated to be sure, here and now.