The Theology of Pastoral Counseling Essay Example for Free

The Theology of bucolic Counseling seekThe present paper dwells on the theology of organism a awkward luck presence. It articulates the theological military posture in pastoral focus that can also be defined as weird/ reason way in the contemporary setting. The point of side chosen is the one of the psyche who is a attending professional.The paper traces the patterns in which way and theology argon enmeshed in the process of conducting pastoral help to be precise, the idea of counseling, the specifics of pastoral counseling, the prescribe of religion in conducting and receiving pastoral counseling, the dichotomy of automobile trunk and head, spirituality, the processes that expression gentlemans gentleman 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 mean that the process takes place in a church or some other religious environs exclusively.Judging from the e xamples of modernity, though, much(prenominal) point of view is hardly correct. As one may see, religion stopped macrocosm chained solely to the church as the place w present sermons ar served and other religious ceremonies are conducted. Once Ross stated that pastoral counseling helps each soulfulness tell their story in a faith context as well as within their somebodyal context. It means that the issues of religious faith and helping presence are important in all environment, be it the church, the clinic or home.To add, there is no suppression of the someoneal 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 theology-concept is tolerance. Pastoral helping i s of high value for both the believers and non-believers in terms of Christian or other faith.The plaza of contrast (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 fallacious 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 Jonahs 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 quadruplet in which some revelatory understanding of experience can be developed. The revelation or husking of God is better structured in the process of pastoral counseling bec ause it comprises moral, ethical and metaphysical elements of a universal theological system and the necessities of everyday human sprightliness. 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 cathartic 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 affable 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 astir(predicate) psychology and psychiatry with their concept apparatus.These sciences aim at mental ameliorate in th e similar was as medicine aims at physical ameliorate. 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 short value. The understanding of soul is even more deemed. Most people see the soul as something polar 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 oblige by Malony who suggested an extensive discourse on the headings of the soul/spirituality/soulness/soulishness element in counseling. Malony criticized both the intellectual/emotive greet (Albert Ellis, 1965, 1980) and the nouthetic approach (Jay Adams, 1970, 1979) to counseling in regard to the spiritual filler. The former treats a hum an 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 dead worded in the famous saying from John 114, And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. One may dramatise 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, wound up 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 concen trates on the stimuli or causes for disruptive mental processes, on symptomatic analysis and the structure of mental reactions, theological counseling seems to be more arouse in correcting causes of human conflicts.And pastoral counsels sincerely believe that the human soul may be anguished 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 quatern cognitive/perceptual processes that strengthen soul in the process of establishing spiritual integrity and managing conflicts and grieves according to shaper 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 impertinent meaning when they focus on transempirical reality. In the process of pastoral counseling the current and daily issues of a person in need are reframed against the eternal spiri tual and theological perspective. A person is manoeuvre to the understanding that 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 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 personal healing and social involvement it develops diagnosis of the problem into a new process of active self-rediscovering, which is 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 fellowship 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, 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 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 CitedThe 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 addressable from Questia, http//www.questia. com/PM. qst? a=od=82397656 Internet. Lyall, David. Pastoral discuss In a Postmodern Context. In clinical Counselling in Pastoral Settings, edited by Gordon Lynch, 7-21. London Routledge, 1999. Malony, H. Ne wton. Counseling Body/Soul Persons. International journal for the Psychology of Religion 8. 4 (1998) 221-242. Ross, Alistair. The Place of Religious Tradition in Pastoral Counselling. In Clinical Counselling in Pastoral Settings, edited by Gordon Lynch, 37-50. London Routledge, 1999.