The Theology of Pastoral Counseling Essay Example for Free

The Theology of Pastoral Counseling Essay The present paper dwells on the theology of being a pastoral helping presence. It articulates the theological stance in pastoral counseling that can also be defined as spiritual/soul counseling in the contemporary setting. The point of view chosen is the one of the person who is a helping professional. The paper traces the patterns in which counseling and theology are enmeshed in the process of conducting pastoral help: to be precise, the concept of counseling, the specifics of pastoral counseling, the place of religion in conducting and receiving pastoral counseling, the dichotomy of body and soul, spirituality, the processes that structure human perception in regard of counseling needs, and. For the goals of the paper it is important to define the basic concept of pastoral counseling. One may think that the process takes place in a church or some other religious environment exclusively. Judging from the examples of modernity, though, such point of view is hardly correct. As one may see, religion stopped being chained solely to the church as the place where sermons are served and other religious ceremonies are conducted. Once Ross stated that pastoral counseling â€Å"helps each person tell their story in a faith context as well as within their personal context. † It means that the issues of religious faith and helping presence are important in any environment, be it the church, the clinic or home. To add, there is no suppression of the personal mode and value in the pastoral helping process; the specific issue of a person being counseled is integrated into the rich theological system. By theology the research often means the narrow discipline of religious thought. Such a restriction prevents counseling (especially pastoral counseling) to develop in full splendor. One of the arguments against the narrowing of â€Å"theology†-concept is tolerance. Pastoral helping is of high value for both the believers and non-believers in terms of Christian or other faith. The situation of conflict (death, the change of state, loss, disruptive emotions or actions, etc. ) is the common reason for a human being to seek help and clinical or pastoral counseling. Non-pastoral counseling enables a person to look for the conflict resolution but the effect may be unstable and incomplete; meanwhile, pastoral presence makes a person to understand the chain of spirituality and the integrity of existence. If to recall Jonah in the belly of the fish, non-pastoral counseling is the process of Jonah’s salvation from the perilous situation, whereas pastoral counseling makes a human being in crisis open-eyed to the Revelation. Ross after Abram called the pastoral counseling an arena or a ‘transitional space’ in which some revelatory understanding of experience can be developed. The revelation or discovery of God is better structured in the process of pastoral counseling because it comprises moral, ethical and metaphysical elements of a universal theological system and the necessities of everyday human life. The aforesaid necessities visibly echo to the religious concepts such as the one of Holy Trinity, the Exodus, the actions of Prophets and Saints. The essence of pastoral helping, thus, is the one of relationship, revelation and hope. It is interesting to research here the essence of helping and problem solving provided in pastoral counseling in comparison to psychotherapeutic counseling and physical care. According to Ross, pastoral counseling is a relationship in which a person agrees to explore issues of meaning and being, helped by another, drawing on psychological and spiritual insights informed by a tradition shaped within a community of faith. The mentioning of psychological and spiritual insights drives the researcher to recall about psychology and psychiatry with their concept apparatus. These sciences aim at mental healing in the similar was as medicine aims at physical healing. The comparison of psychology, medical care and pastoral counseling makes one think that mind and body are traditionally seen as separate realms of a human being of unequal value. The understanding of soul is even more deemed. Most people see the soul as something opposite to the body or inferior to it. Plato stressed the eternal nature of soul that had been created prior to body; the body was mortal, whereas the soul could not die. In the Old Testament, meanwhile, people are referred to as living souls. The concept of soul means a lot for pastoral counseling as it was proved in the brilliant article by Malony who suggested an extensive discourse on the questions of the soul/spirituality/soulness/soulishness element in counseling. Malony criticized both the rational/emotive approach (Albert Ellis, 1965, 1980) and the nouthetic approach (Jay Adams, 1970, 1979) to counseling in regard to the spiritual filler. The former treats a human being as the physically-oriented creature whose primary task is to adjust to environment. The latter approach emphasizes the salvation of soul in religion as the primary task for a human being. Malony proposed a monistic approach or nonreductive physicalism in order to treat human beings as body/soul unities or entities. Such a dichotomous integrity of flesh and soul in a life was perfectly worded in the famous saying from John 1:14, â€Å"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. † One may assume that there is no rigid boundary between physical and spiritual worlds which are interconnected. In the post-modern environment the genuinely theological quest for the human soul was inherited by psychology with its concepts of mental processes, ego, emotional and cognitive drivers. This theological-psychological relay does not imply complete identity. Whereas theological perspective used to find love, the psychological one means libido. In other words, whereas psychotherapeutic science concentrates on the stimuli or causes for disruptive mental processes, on symptomatic analysis and the structure of mental reactions, theological counseling seems to be more â€Å"interested [†¦] in correcting causes† of human conflicts. And pastoral counsels sincerely believe that the human soul may be tortured with pain and desperation in the same way as the human body may be tortured with cancer. It is the soul which is aided in pastoral counseling. James (1985) assumed that there are four cognitive/perceptual processes that strengthen soul in the process of establishing spiritual integrity and managing conflicts and grieves according to divine laws. He spoke of insights, understandings, feelings, and actions which seem to be brain functions. But Malony noticed that the aforesaid processes are enriched with new meaning when they focus on â€Å"transempirical reality. † In the process of pastoral counseling the current and daily issues of a person in need are reframed against the eternal spiritual and theological perspective. A person is guided to the understanding that â€Å"we are not alone, since the creation points to one who is beyond us so that the ‘why’ question becomes the ‘who’ question. † John Patton (1990) shrewdly stated that pastoral counseling â€Å"involves assisting persons to move from talking generally about themselves and specifically about their problems to talking specifically about themselves and generally about their problems. † Malony, Ross and Patton similarly emphasized the value of theological perspective that made pastoral counseling a powerful media to guide living souls through unstable situations and problematic issues. Like psychotherapeutic or clinical counseling, the pastoral one has the aim of helping the person to fit into the environment in the healthy and authentic way. Any counseling means â€Å"personal healing and social involvement;† it develops diagnosis of the problem into a new process of active self-rediscovering, which is â€Å"a healing endeavor based on active listening and the giving of counsel. † But pastoral counseling has a more valuable effect on a person due to its theological underlining. It helps a person to rediscover and straighten his/her spirituality instead of momentous fixing of a problem with all the spiritual gains and revelations sinking into oblivion the other day. To put it in a nut-shell, the pastoral helping encompasses several systems of knowledge and action including psychology, therapeutic care, communication as well as theological perspective. Though pastoral counseling activates the same brain functions as psychotherapy does – e. g. , insights, understandings, feelings, and actions pastoral counseling seems to be better organized than counseling per se from the transempirical point of view. The pastoral helping reminds people of the higher sense and meaning in life which is not just the implementation of mechanistic and materialistic rules. The relations between the participants of the counseling process are holistic in sense that the recipient of counseling is no less valuable and worth to exist than the pastoral counselor. The latter is always kept on guard by the warning given to Ezra, â€Å"You are not a better judge than God, or more intelligent than the Most High! † It is no surprise that Donald Capps (1981) named counseling â€Å"the activity of God. † The person being counseled analyzes the specific processes of his/her specific life and, simultaneously, he/she is helped to view his/her particularities from the eternal, longitudinal, divine perspective. Works Cited The Complete Bible: An American Translation, trans. J. M. Powis Smith and Edgar J. Goodspeed [book on-line] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939, accessed 10 February 2006), 26; available from Questia, http://www.questia. com/PM. qst? a=od=82397656; Internet. Lyall, David. â€Å"Pastoral Counselling In a Postmodern Context. † In Clinical Counselling in Pastoral Settings, edited by Gordon Lynch, 7-21. London: Routledge, 1999. Malony, H. Newton. â€Å"Counseling Body/Soul Persons. † International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 8. 4 (1998): 221-242. Ross, Alistair. â€Å"The Place of Religious Tradition in Pastoral Counselling. † In Clinical Counselling in Pastoral Settings, edited by Gordon Lynch, 37-50. London: Routledge, 1999.