their practices were pastoral theology. In the late sixth century, sensing a need to guide pastoral practices in a more systematic way, Pope Gregory the Great published Liber regulae pastoralis (The Book of Pastoral Rule) (c. 590 CE) (Oden, 1984). This ministry “manual,” often translated into English as Pastoral Care, was similar in kind to an earlier tract by John Chrysostom entitled On the Priesthood (386 CE) and was concerned with guiding clergy in the “care of souls.” Gregory’s work gave rise to a body of literature (pastorilia) that increasingly became normative for clergy instruction and development. This literature’s influence and use lasted through the medieval period and Protestant Reformation, the latter marked by such classic works as Martin Bucer’s On the True Cure of Souls (1538) and Richard Baxter’s Reformed Pastor (1656), and in some traditions even into the early twentieth century. Along with naming the tasks and practices of ordained ministry, pastoral theology was frequently the term that designated this body of literature that offered principles and guidelines for ordained ministry and was concerned fundamentally with the personal and vocational formation and training of clergy. Those understandings reigned, more or less, until the Enlightenment, when even more systematic and formal training of clergy increasingly became the norm and theological education began a fragmentation into various areas of specialized study.
Modern Period
Specialization followed the rise and influence of the modern research university in sixteenth-century Europe and was furthered in Protestant theological education by the efforts of Friederich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and his student Karl Immanuel Nitzsch (1787–1868) in early- to mid-nineteenth-century Germany. The research university itself was becoming increasingly specialized. Attempting to secure theology’s place in the university, these two men sought to “professionalize” theological education. They argued that like law and medicine theological education furthered the common good. Hence, like lawyers and physicians, clergy had to be trained in a specific knowledge base and set of skills, namely, those required for the leadership and practices of ministry. That training is what pastoral theology traditionally provided.
Pastoral theology thus came to describe both the education for and practice of clerical leadership and its tasks in a manner more formal, regularized, and “scientific” than ministry manuals alone could provide, though the manuals continued to be utilized. The tasks garnering pastoral theology’s attention included pastoral care (poimenics), instruction in the faith (catechetics), applying moral principles to life experiences (casuistry), and, in some circles, preaching (homiletics), though Protestants typically treated preaching separately. Pastoral theology aimed to prepare the minister for attending to the four ancient pastoral functions required for “the cure of souls,” namely, healing, sustaining, guiding, and reconciling (Clebsch and Jaekle, 1964, 32–66). Rather than being scholarly or intellectual in its focus, however, pastoral theology was explicitly practice oriented. It was grounded in the application to pastoral experience of various rules and techniques derived largely from more abstract theological principles and honed by experienced clergy. Hence, pastoral theology was applied systematic or dogmatic theology. In keeping with classical understandings, it often took the form of hints and directions for how clergy should carry out their duties in various situations while guided by doctrinal standards of the Christian faith and by the wisdom provided in the literature (manuals) of pastoral theology.
Due to the influences of Schleiermacher and Nitzsch, by the mid-nineteenth century some began to describe pastoral theology as a component of “practical” theology, which along with “philosophical” and “historical” theology, named the primary areas or disciplines within theological education or what came to be called “the theological encyclopedia.” While Schleiermacher and Nitzsch’s influences were strong—practical theology, like pastoral theology, came to have varied meanings (though the former typically included the study of ethics along with many of the functions and tasks of pastoral leadership cited previously).
Schleiermacher is thought by some to have perpetuated the view that practical theology (including its component, pastoral theology) was reducible to applied principles and techniques of ministry, what Edward Farley has termed the “clerical paradigm” (Farley, 1983, 87), and also that an attempt was made by Nitzsch to correct this way of thinking. However, a close reading of Schleiermacher’s work reveals that he, like Nitzsch, resisted the notion of practical theology as “a mere application of theological knowledge of some other type” and as being concerned simply with techniques or technical knowledge (Nitzsch, 1847, 33). Both men, in fact, claimed that practical theology was an autonomous theological discipline involving the acquisition and use of the minister’s own “inner constitution,” or habitus, “the truth and purity of a Christian disposition” (Schleiermacher, 1990, 114), “rules of art” as opposed to “legalistic directives” (Schleiermacher, 1990, 25, 135), and that practical theology required “a convergence of all theoretical knowledge of Christianity that is becoming a church in order to establish a methodological consciousness for official practice” (Nitzsch, 1847, 34). Hence, though Schleiermacher’s legacy is the clerical paradigm, as Farley suggests, this is not what Schleiermacher envisioned and desired. He and Nitzsch sought to ground how pastors conceptualized their work in ministry, what that work entailed, and how it should be carried out in a manner more methodologically rich and intentional than classical understandings. Even so, this notion of pastoral theology as a part of practical theology, and as concerned merely with the training of clergy in the applied principles and techniques of ministry, prevailed in both Europe and North America, more or less, until the early twentieth century.
Twentieth Century
Throughout much of the twentieth century, European thinking continued to follow largely the clerical paradigm, often substituting the term “pastoral studies” to denote a focus on the training of, and skills for, pastoral ministry, and appealing largely to the principles of applied theology to describe pastoral theological method. In North America and Great Britain, however, and among a comparatively small group in continental Europe, by the mid-twentieth century pastoral theology tended to be viewed differently: more broadly in some ways and more narrowly in others. In the North American context, due chiefly to the influences of Anton T. Boisen and his student, Seward Hiltner, as well as Wayne E. Oates and David E. Roberts, it broadened to include critical reflection on both theory and practice. No longer was pastoral theology conceived simply as applied dogmatic or systematic theology (theory) on the one hand, or merely as technical proficiency in ministry skills and wisdom (practice) on the other. Pastoral theology now gave much greater significance to the concrete lived experiences brought to pastors and, in Boisen’s case, to chaplains and those serving in institutional ministries, by persons with problems, conflicts, struggles, and needs. Consistent with Schleiermacher and Nitzsch’s visions for practical theology a century earlier, pastoral theology came to include knowledge and perspectives gleaned from theory and practice brought together in an ongoing mutual, critical, dialectical, correlational, and/or hermeneutical relationship. The result was that while theological theory and doctrine might guide and shape pastoral practice and thus pastoral theology, as classical views held, critical reflection upon practice, including the uniqueness of concrete experience, was expected to play a central role in guiding and shaping theory and doctrine. Giving particular attention to pastoral encounters with human needs as the basis for discerning the relationship between the Christian faith and lived experience, pastoral theology in the mid-twentieth century drew increasingly on resources provided by psychology, psychotherapy and related clinical perspectives, other human sciences (anthropology, sociology, critical theory), and hermeneutics. Pastoral theology appropriated critically the various perspectives offered by those disciplines and their perspectives in an attempt to “draw conclusions of a theological order from reflection on these observations” (Hiltner, 1958, 20).
Simultaneously, however, especially in North America, pastoral theology channeled its broadened critical reflections more narrowly: almost entirely toward pastoral care and counseling. Pastoral theology also became more or less exclusively tied to Protestant liberalism and its principal tenets, and was influenced especially by the work of theologian Paul Tillich. Moreover, moving away from its classical focus on the concerns and practices of ministry more broadly conceived,
