A History of Pastoral Care in America

From Salvation to Self-Realization

Book Details

Discerning Reader Editorial Review

Reviewed 06/15/2009 by Bob Kellemen.

Recommended. A stand-out work in the rare genre of histories of pastoral counseling, helping trace the general movement within the field of pastoral care.

About every ten-to-twenty years a defining text is written in the rather unique genre of the history of pastoral care and counseling. In 1953, John T. McNeil penned the classic A History of the Cure of Souls. Eleven years later William Clebsch and Charles Jaekle gave us their excellent work Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective. In 1987, Thomas Oden authored Classical Pastoral Care, Vol. 3, “Pastoral Counsel.” In 2007, this review's author wrote Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction.

E. Brooks Holifield, professor of American church history at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, has spent a lifetime studying, researching, teaching, speaking, and writing in the same genre. With Abingdon Press in 1983 (re-released by Wipf & Stock in 2005), he authored A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization.

Clebsch and Jaekle, McNeil, and Oden wrote broad histories of soul care, while Kellemen focused on African American soul care. Holifield tackles the challenge of a comprehensive history of pastoral care in American religious history. His wide-ranging guide traces the trajectory of American pastoral care, as the subtitle suggests, from a focus on Christ, sin, suffering, and salvation, to a focus on self, self-actualization, and secular psychology.

Holifield is correct when he notes that every pastor adopts wittingly or unwittingly some theory of pastoral counseling. Unfortunately, many either have no conscious model, or follow models that are bereft of biblical and historical substance. Attention to Holifield’s findings can assist pastors, lay people, and professional Christian counselors to avoid this tendency.

Holifield also makes the excellent point that “for almost twenty centuries the Christian clergy have spent more time listening to people than preaching to them.” This is a crucial reminder in an age when the options seem to move between the extreme of nothing but the preached Word from the pulpit or nothing but secular psychology in the pastor’s office.

Holifield’s work is both a history of the personal ministry of the Word (the private ministry of pastor and parishioner in addition to the public pulpit ministry of the Word) and a history of the changing relationship between theology and psychology in pastoral ministry. Holifield documents the important truth that American pastors have always had a psychology—originally it was a biblical psychology with an understanding of people, problems, and solutions developed theologically. Over time, secular psychological reasoning came to trump biblical psychology for many pastors.

A History of Pastoral Care in America commences with the Puritans and their focus on sin, idols of the heart, cases of conscience, suffering, consolation, and comfort. A major strength of Holifield’s work is his extended focus on specific pastors with specific parishioners, such as Puritan Pastor Thomas Hooker’s weekly pastoral conversations with one Joan Drake of Esher. In his ministry, Pastor Hooker followed the classic, historical pastoral role. “His task was to glorify God through the traditional range of healing, sustaining, guiding, and reconciling activities that characterized work in a local congregation.” Hooker, as all the great Puritan divines, performed surgery on the souls of hurting and hardened people, bringing them to spiritual healing through the personal ministry of the Word.

Holifield’s chapter on the understanding and the affections, as developed by Jonathan Edwards and his peers, is priceless. Modern pastors and spiritual friends can learn much about being soul physicians from this study which taught that we pursue (volitional/will) what we perceive (understanding/mind) to be pleasing (affections/soul). Theirs was a biblical psychology that appreciated the comprehensive understanding of the imago Dei as relational, rational, volitional, and emotional.

Holifield engages in another extended look at one counselor in chapter four: Pastor Icabod Spencer. Spencer’s book, Pastor’s Sketches, served well as a manual for pastoral conversations with anxious inquirers. His work in the 1850s sounded surprisingly like that of Hooker in the 1630s.

It would not be until after the Civil War that the trend toward the secularization of the ministry took full force. The ideal moved from communal self-sacrifice to individual self-love. The new pastoral theology now taught in many seminaries (in the 1860s to the 1960s) had more in common with secular psychology than the biblical psychology of the preceding 200 years.

Holifield’s greatest gift in this book is his ability to synthesize large tracks of material. In particular, as indicated, his subtitle communicates his understanding of the historical path taken by American pastors: “from salvation to self-realization.” This synthesis is both the key strength of the book and one possible weakness.

Agreed, the noted shift has occurred—from a God-centered, sin-focused ministry to a humanity-centered, self-help ministry. That is not at issue.

The question is whether the shift is as comprehensive as plotted. This tension has always existed in pastoral care, not only in America. And, more than a few have avoided this pitfall, even in recent pastoral ministry. One problem is the need for careful definition. What makes pastoral ministry “self-realization”-related?

Also, this reviewer, having authored a work on the history of African American soul care (Beyond the Suffering), finds it disappointing that Holifield’s comprehensive examination of pastoral care in America is comprehensive for white pastoral care, but is not comprehensive or culturally-informed for pastoral care from other cultural perspectives.

Still, Holifield’s work stands out in the rare genre of histories of pastoral counseling. To see the general movement within the field of pastoral care, A History of Pastoral Care in America is extremely helpful.