CPE Needs a Refocus

David Pettett

The Clinical Pastoral Education movement has taken great insights from psychology and is faithfully teaching how these can be used in a pastoral context. The person not trained with these insights is likely to say what can be the most inappropriate things to the hurting person. The desire to justify God or just to bring words of comfort can lead to well meaning people doing the opposite of what they want to do and actually bring more pain. CPE use of psychological insights can help the carer be more appropriate in their caring. But a problem has developed. The movement has lost its roots in biblical Christianity.

CPE teaches a right emphasis that the Chaplain needs to be sensitive to where the person they are ministering to is at. This is normally a hard place, a prison cell, a hospital bed. This is not the place to proselytise and it is not the place to teach, rebuke, exhort. It is the place to listen and to empower. And yet the CPE movement has missed the point that the Christian Chaplain brings with them the greatest empowerment this world has ever known. They bring the message of Christ who alone can save. In fact the way the movement has developed, “Christian Chaplain” is an oxymoron. The CPE movement has succumbed to a Universalist theology. It teaches that the role of the Chaplain is to help the person in need find meaning in their own hard place. This “meaning” is whatever the person wants it to be. So the Chaplain is not to speak of Christ for this will distract the person in need from finding their own meaning. Rather than helping people find God, this approach shapes God to fit wherever we want him. It invents a god to mean whatever we want it to mean.

This emphasis evacuates Chaplaincy from all meaning. Pastoral care arises out of the compassion of Christ. This is his compassion shown to the world ultimately in his atoning death and resurrection. This compassion brings reconciliation between God and man. True Chaplaincy brings this compassion into the hard place. Using the insights of psychology the Chaplain will sensitively bring this compassion in such a way that the person in need will hear it and understand that it is only Christ who can bring meaning to their suffering. The Chaplain who does not do this is failing as a Chaplain, for the only true Chaplaincy is Christian Chaplaincy that speaks of the reconciling work of God in Christ.

The CPE movement has failed because it stops at psychological insights. It does not go on to do the hard work of working out how to bring the reconciliation of Christ to a suffering person who may never have given Christ much thought. While it might allow talk of God, spirituality or prayer, it refuses to allow the possibility of speaking of Christ, who is the human race’s only comfort.

How then does the Christian Chaplain bring the emphasis of the unique reconciling work of Christ into the pastoral encounter in a way that will empower the person being ministered to?

The Chaplain first needs some basic theological insights. These are what God has revealed in His word:
1. The nature of man: Created in the image of God. Fallen. Redeemed in the life, death, resurrection, ascension and second coming of the Lord Jesus.
2. The nature of God: Three persons, one God: Father, Son (fully God and fully Man) and Holy Spirit.
3. Christian Eschatology: expectations for life – despite suffering in this world God is in charge and will bring all things together in Christ putting an end to pain and suffering, bringing a new heaven and a new earth. Persevere, there is reward.

These points of theology give the Chaplain a starting point and a clear understanding of what is going on in the human condition.

The value of a human life is that people are created in the image of God. A person is not valuable because they have done good things or that they are a good person. Human value is not even in that a person is loved by God, as valuable as that love is. The suffering person does not necessarily see, and rarely feels, the love of God in their suffering. The unique Judaeo Christian understanding that humanity is created in the image of God is the one thing that declares the value of each human being. (This is another reason why the CPE movement has failed. By welcoming people of other Faiths, which do not share this understanding of humanity, into its colleges, the movement has lost the very reason as to why it is important to bring the compassion of Christ to people. They are worth it because they are image bearers of the Creator.) The person in need is helped to see that even though they may not feel loved by God, though they may even question the very love of God itself, they are created in the image of God and therefore have deep value.

If a person recognises they’re valued because they are created in the image of the Creator, they may well then ask the question as to why an image bearer should then be suffering. The Christian Chaplain’s insight that suffering has entered the world because of humanity’s fallen state, because of man’s rejection of the rule of God, will show the dichotomy humanity lives with: bearing God’s image but out of fellowship with God. Only the Christian Chaplain can bring the reconciling work of Christ to bring any sense of hope to the suffering person.

Without this biblical perspective on life God becomes who you want him to be or he is shaped into something he is not. And that is no help to anyone.

My argument is that a biblical understanding of the human condition, of who God is and of where the world is heading is the necessary basis for bringing real compassion and empowerment to suffering people in a hard places. Pastoral ministry that relies only on psychological insights into the human condition and does not bring a biblical understanding is not pastoral ministry as Jesus brought it to those he encountered in their suffering and it is not the legacy Jesus left us.

It is time for the CPE movement to refocus and do the hard work of teaching pastors how to bring the compassion of Christ into a hurting world in a way that respects the dignity of the human person created in the image of God.