The Minister and the Care of Souls by Daniel Day Williams
Chapter 4: Forgiveness, Judgment and Acceptance
II. Self-Knowledge and Theological Study
The minister needs theological clarity about the doctrine of God, so also about the doctrine of sin. When someone comes to the pastor feeling cast off from God, human psychology and theological insight must be so fused and skillfully mediated to the person that his way to God may be opened. Here words easily become substituted for reality. In the
Christian view of life there is real guilt, not only guilt feeling, yet real guilt can be judged only in confession and prayer, never by
psychological analysis or social standards alone. The pastor’s task is to open the way for the person to come to confess his real need for God.
That means the pastor must be able to clarify the Christian
understanding of man’s relationship to God and yet intrude as little as possible when the other person reaches out toward God. We see why the self-knowledge of the pastor is a complicated structure. He must know and use the great symbols and concepts of his faith and yet never take refuge in them as if they had meaning apart from their bearing on what men do and feel. He should be able to detect the dry accents of cant, and to speak the words of grace and hope without apology when they need to be spoken.
How, then, does anyone acquire some measure of this capacity? If we knew the full answer, life in the Church would be much smoother than it is, most probably it would be quite dull, and theological faculties would not be continually revising the curriculum of theological study. But in theological education we must have the best answers thought and experience will yield, so let us turn to the meaning of theological education in this context.
grows out of God’s self-revelation in history, and see this as it bears upon every man’s quest for the meaning of his existence?
Let us begin with the traditional disciplines. The candidate for the ministry studies Bible, Church History, Theology, Homiletics, Church Administration, Christian Education, Pastoral Theology, and so on.
There are some who suspect that the enterprise of providing instruction in all these fields inevitably tends to make theological education an abstract and technical process which may never reach the inner life of the person. It is sometimes proposed, especially in the beginning of the theological course, that there should be a deliberate emphasis on the students’ personal quest for faith and truth. He should approach his problems "existentially" rather than give nearly all his energy to the mastery of the academic disciplines.
The crucial point surely lies in how we conceive the study of Bible, Church History, and the other fields. Each represents a subject matter derived from the faith of the Church in its historical expressions. Each presents us with a realm of objective concepts and issues which involve technical, linguistic, and philosophical disciplines. But the meaning of the faith and the tradition is surely just the meaning of human existence.
To study the Church’s thought about God as if he does not matter is simply not to understand what we are studying.
It is right that we should ask the student to concentrate his attention very largely on the subjects rather than upon himself. No one should be
compelled to engage in continual introspection about his faith. That may inhibit personal growth. We do, however, need to interpret all
theological studies in such a way that their bearing upon real questions is kept in view. There is a crisis for the student when he asks just where this great structure of faith bears upon his personal existence. One of America’s outstanding theologians once confessed in an
autobiographical essay that his crisis came after he had been teaching theology for five years. Personal tragedy had caused him to face the question whether what he had been teaching was his conviction rather than something not really believed. In good theological teaching we do not try to produce such a crisis, but we should expect it, and try to provide such a conception of the meaning of theological studies that when it comes, it may lead to a matured faith rather than to a destroyed one. What we must make clear is that the minister comes to self-
knowledge not as something added to his basic studies, but within them, for they are the objective and significant areas of the faith which he is to
represent and serve.
The relation of tradition to present experience is one of the most
important aspects of our problem. It is because of the weight, authority, and distance of the past that many students find their study remote from life. There are those who find it difficult to become interested in
traditional creeds, forms, and concepts. There are others who readily lose themselves in the past because it offers a refuge from facing the present. For both groups It may be necessary to clarify that dimension of the self which arises out of the past, and which requires us to become ourselves through appropriating the meaning of the past.
To be a self is to share in a community of selves which has a history. In the Church the past comes to us as the deposit left by the experience of people who lived by faith, That tradition offers a fertile soil of meaning in which the soul can grow. We possess ourselves in part by discovering and possessing that past. C. G. Jung’s psychological theory of a
collective unconscious stream of psychic life with its archetypal
symbols as a dynamic source of each individual experience appears to have highly speculative features; but surely he is pointing to an
important aspect of the psychic life. It is noteworthy that Freud makes a similar suggestion when he speculates about the origin of the sense of guilt. Apart from the speculative dimensions of these theories we can recognize the reality of the psychic inheritance. There is a psychological dimension in the power of the "cloud of witnesses" which inspires and strengthens faith. That which is deepest in the self is evoked by its encounter with tradition as the self-expression of the community whose heir the self is.
A clear illustration is afforded by the discovery most of us make that we have inherited our peculiar beliefs and values from a special group. It is a critical point in the theological course when the Baptist, Episcopalian, Methodist, or Quaker discovers that values which he has deemed self- evident have been contributed by a particular tradition and that there are others for whom quite different convictions are just as self-evidently valid. We begin to know who we are when we know what our
community has been. So the study of Church History can be regarded as an essay in self-knowledge just as surely as a course in depth
psychology. Indeed, Church History may offer a special instance, for perhaps more than most theological subjects it is felt by many to be remote from contemporary concerns. But Church History should be understood as an inquiry into why we now feel and live as we do. One
Christian psychologist remarked that he believes the resistance of students to Church History is primarily a resistance to facing
themselves. Unconsciously they realize that it means self-discovery.
Let us state the principle, then, that every theological subject can be the occasion for self-knowledge. Experience of theological teachers shows that the answer to the question which subject will become the key to a student’s personal Involvement is quite unpredictable. We tend to learn best where we possess certain skills and can experience some mastery.
Not all minds formulate their problems in the same ways. Therefore, in pleading for concern with self-knowledge through the traditional
disciplines we are not asking for emphasis upon any particular subject.
What is required is a point of view toward theological study which encourages the soul’s pilgrimage toward what the Puritans called an
"experimental" knowledge of God’s grace.
Such a conception of theological study proposes no substitute for the patient mastery of the methods and materials of academic disciplines.
God’s creation, with all its mystery, is an affair of terrible precision. To discover the demands of technical knowledge is one part of the
discovery of what it means to be human.