Kate Bradford
Chaplaincy is a ministry that has its raison d'etre in personal encounters. To this end, there is a strong focus on the practical nature of this ministry, thus, a particular focus on operational or practical theology. But to assume in any way, that an operational theology is somehow neutral simply arising out of particular situations; or uninhibited by the weight of formal theology, or does not precipitate from a structural theology, is a mistake. Operational theology, as any theology, is neither neutral or value free. Operational theology either aligns with some theological positions or reacts to others.
Operational theological practices and world views function as visible and invisible theologies. These views arise out of a particular theological context influences by attitudes to Scripture, history and tradition. Operational theology does not exist is a simple form, it is precipitated from both theology and psycho-sociological attitudes. Orthopraxis is underpinned by orthotheologia and orthocardia: actions and attitudes are underpinned by a set of beliefs and emotional commitment to those beliefs.
Chaplaincy training focuses on informing a participants’ operational theology. Any trainee undergoing chaplaincy training has a reasonable right to understand the implications of the theological presuppositions underlying the practical training. This is necessary because there is a troubling assumption that chaplains can undergo a chaplaincy training course involving a high level of: personal disclosure; vulnerability; examination and then modification of pastoral practice through the verbatim method; but not be theologically changed. The training has the express purpose of altering a participant’s operational theology; however operational theology has levers that move a participant’s structural theology. In fact I would argue that often the unstated intent of chaplaincy training is to change the trainee’s structural theology.
Theological assumptions are freighted in within the operational theology; each operation theology represents theological proposition, containing strands of theological DNA. As the participant submits to the program their theology is cracked open. Just as patients are vulnerable and suggestible, chaplaincy trainee participants are also vulnerable and exposed, and the process has unsheathed their theological DNA. During this time of exposure, new strands of theological DNA can be spliced in modifying the theological positions held. This is not necessarily a bad thing as this is one way a Christian grows and changes. But, there is a need for this process to be consciously acknowledged both by trainer and course participant, and the need of separating out the explorations of theological challenges in a less vulnerable environment.
Because of the theological nature of chaplaincy course content, and the potential vulnerability of trainees two opposite problems arise: a trainee may become sensitive to the fact that their theology is being challenged and emotionally pull back from the course and learn very little, or the contrary, complete submersion in the course results in later discovery that they have a number of new unexamined theological beliefs that they did not have before the course, along with new competing loyalties but no avenues to discuss or resolve the discrepancies.
For evangelical chaplaincy trainees, whose identity is in Christ, and seeking to sensitively share the love and hope of Christ through thought, word and deed, a particular training environment is needed. Chaplaincy is a highly specific Christian ministry that requires a theologically safe environment for trainees to participate. Chaplaincy training is vastly different to a doing a Clinical Supervision course or Mental Health First Aid course. Chaplaincy is not a tequnique – chaplaincy is a Christian ministry. I wish to suggest the following safeguards for training in this Christian ministry: 1) Chaplaincy trainers have high levels of training and practice in both theology and chaplaincy; 2) the trainer’s personal theological perspective is clearly articulated and open to examination; 3) the theological positional of authors of course material is acknowledged; 4) opportunities to discuss the theology of an idea, or course of action, in addition to the more subjective theological reflections; 5) the trainer is able to direct trainees to theological resources that help guide the trainees through, formation of new practical theologies, and structural theological changes. In many situations the changes may actually involve loosening unhelpful adhesions between theology and practice, distinguishing between the content of the gospel and gospel practice, respecting boundaries, acknowledging limits and accepting finitude; rather than actually altering structural beliefs.
Such training guidelines would provide a higher degree of transparency, and greater safety for the participant as they enter the immersion process of being a chaplaincy trainee, the end point should precipitate in greater transparency, safety, comfort and hope for the suffer the chaplain seeks to help. Chaplaincy remains a ministry that has its raison d'etre in personal encounters.
Gela
He leads me beside still waters
Friday 31 August 2012
Wednesday 8 August 2012
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.
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.
Monday 6 August 2012
Christology and Theology of Chaplaincy
Kate Bradford
Christology is the way of speaking about Jesus. This can be explicit or implicit, low or high Christology. As a broad Christian discipline, Christology seeks to explain the relationship between theology and anthropology.
At a particular level it explores the relationship between the human and divine natures of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, or the Anointed One. To hold a high Christology is to focus particularly on the divine attributes of the Christ, to hold a low Christology is to focus on the human attributes, or cheap benefits of Jesus’ ministry. Christology can be expressed in terms that differ depending on the perspective of the commentator; as such a view can be either from above or below.
In addition to various points of view a Christology focusing objective and subjective frames may be employed. However, Christology whether high or low, is always discussed to some extent from ‘below’ or within the subjective frame as it is a view from a human perspective. Humanly speaking no exhaustive Christology can be formulated, but rather tends towards a position based on ‘evidence’ concerning the Divine, contained within the texts of scripture as recorded in the Old Testament (OT)and New Testament (NT) of the Bible.
It is important to note that there are a number of Christological positions formulated that do not rely upon the Bible as an authoritative source. There are other redactions of the Biblical material with other disciplines. Examples of these would be found in feminist or liberation or post-modern Christologies or even much more broadly there are Islamic, Buddhist or atheist Christologies. The point here is that every human holds a Christology of some sort.
The implications of these various Christologies for the Theology of Chaplaincy are foundational. Behind all chaplaincy work every chaplain operates from either an implicit or explicit Christology. Whatever Christological position a chaplain holds this position will set the chaplain’s deep agenda.
At a cosmic level Christology explores the relationship between God the Father and his role in creation and then entering the created order. (John 1,Col 1, Heb 1, Phil 2) At a local level Christology focuses on Jesus’ earthly ministry (Synoptic Gospels), the nature of his ongoing relationship to humanity and the particular intimacy that he shares with his followers.
Christology has two concerns; who is Jesus Christ in himself, and flowing from this, what is Jesus Christ for us? However to press these category differences too far is to begin to artificially differentiate between his nature and mission.
For Christian chaplains there are huge implications that flow from our understanding of Christology and our internalized positions. Jesus tells his followers that they are salt and light; yet immediately tied to this is the possibility that salt can be bad or lose its saltiness and likewise light can be poor or even hidden. From this we can derive a view that it is possible for Christians to hold poor, bad, dull, misguided or undeveloped Christologies that will negatively affect the ministry/witness of the Christian. It is quite possible, for these underlying beliefs often remain unarticulated or even unacknowledged but never-the-less powerful and formative.
What a chaplain believes about Jesus in himself and his function will direct the focus and emphasis of their chaplaincy work. The theories of functional Christology are tied to views of the atonement. These views seek to explain how it is possible that imperfect, incomplete human beings can relate to a perfect and complete God, and how this is made possible by the God-man Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Of course there is a second conversation to be had after this conversation. The second necessary conversation is: how is the Chaplain to be in the world. Most chaplaincy thought and theory is around the second conversation while ignoring the implications, importance and dependence on the first conversation.
Christology is the way of speaking about Jesus. This can be explicit or implicit, low or high Christology. As a broad Christian discipline, Christology seeks to explain the relationship between theology and anthropology.
At a particular level it explores the relationship between the human and divine natures of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, or the Anointed One. To hold a high Christology is to focus particularly on the divine attributes of the Christ, to hold a low Christology is to focus on the human attributes, or cheap benefits of Jesus’ ministry. Christology can be expressed in terms that differ depending on the perspective of the commentator; as such a view can be either from above or below.
In addition to various points of view a Christology focusing objective and subjective frames may be employed. However, Christology whether high or low, is always discussed to some extent from ‘below’ or within the subjective frame as it is a view from a human perspective. Humanly speaking no exhaustive Christology can be formulated, but rather tends towards a position based on ‘evidence’ concerning the Divine, contained within the texts of scripture as recorded in the Old Testament (OT)and New Testament (NT) of the Bible.
It is important to note that there are a number of Christological positions formulated that do not rely upon the Bible as an authoritative source. There are other redactions of the Biblical material with other disciplines. Examples of these would be found in feminist or liberation or post-modern Christologies or even much more broadly there are Islamic, Buddhist or atheist Christologies. The point here is that every human holds a Christology of some sort.
The implications of these various Christologies for the Theology of Chaplaincy are foundational. Behind all chaplaincy work every chaplain operates from either an implicit or explicit Christology. Whatever Christological position a chaplain holds this position will set the chaplain’s deep agenda.
At a cosmic level Christology explores the relationship between God the Father and his role in creation and then entering the created order. (John 1,Col 1, Heb 1, Phil 2) At a local level Christology focuses on Jesus’ earthly ministry (Synoptic Gospels), the nature of his ongoing relationship to humanity and the particular intimacy that he shares with his followers.
Christology has two concerns; who is Jesus Christ in himself, and flowing from this, what is Jesus Christ for us? However to press these category differences too far is to begin to artificially differentiate between his nature and mission.
For Christian chaplains there are huge implications that flow from our understanding of Christology and our internalized positions. Jesus tells his followers that they are salt and light; yet immediately tied to this is the possibility that salt can be bad or lose its saltiness and likewise light can be poor or even hidden. From this we can derive a view that it is possible for Christians to hold poor, bad, dull, misguided or undeveloped Christologies that will negatively affect the ministry/witness of the Christian. It is quite possible, for these underlying beliefs often remain unarticulated or even unacknowledged but never-the-less powerful and formative.
What a chaplain believes about Jesus in himself and his function will direct the focus and emphasis of their chaplaincy work. The theories of functional Christology are tied to views of the atonement. These views seek to explain how it is possible that imperfect, incomplete human beings can relate to a perfect and complete God, and how this is made possible by the God-man Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Of course there is a second conversation to be had after this conversation. The second necessary conversation is: how is the Chaplain to be in the world. Most chaplaincy thought and theory is around the second conversation while ignoring the implications, importance and dependence on the first conversation.
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