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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Three Characteristics of the Care of Souls
To describe a method of care of souls that includes actual
treatment, we must name three characteristics: practising the
art of spiritual healing, providing spiritual instruction, and
giving spiritual guidance.
To say that the care of souls is the art of spiritual healing
means that it can to a certain extent be compared with the
science of medicine Thisisnota new idea ofit. The same thought
was expressed by St. Chrysostom, by Luther and many others.
This conception of the care of souls does not require us to
regard the spiritual adviser as a person whose health contrasts
with the illness of those among whom he works. Rather, as one
writer has put it, we should think of him only as the one who
knows where the medicine is to be found. It is his duty to make a
diagnosis and prescribe a remedy—a religious remedy for a
religious disorder.
The care of souls also includes giving spiritual instruction.
Some Protestant thinkers have criticised the proposal to include
spiritual teaching in the province of the care of souls. Their
contention has been that a pedagogic ministry involves an
invidious distinction between those with knowledge and
authority and those who are ignorant and weak. Teaching would be
unnecessary if those without knowledge or authority were
trained to take personal responsibility for their own actions.
If a spiritual adviser’s duty includes spiritual guidance he
cannot avoid imparting knowledge. He is treating human beings
and he must have regard for the material he is working with and
for the laws governing the transmission of knowledge and the
whole process of education.
Certainly spiritual teaching imparts knowledge concerning
spiritual realities by the method of description; but a spiritual
adviser must aim at guiding his confidants in such a manner
that their knowledge of spiritual things is not theoretical but
practical and immediate: based upon personal experience of
and familiarity with the spiritual realities. He must, in fact,
help a person to act in a manner that is in harmony with his
eternal destiny.
Bishop E. Berggrav! of Norway discusses this point in his
1 Helgelse, Stockholm, 1934.
42
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