Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 05:3 (Summer 1996)
Article: The Cure of Souls; or, Pastoral Counseling: The Insight of John Owen
Author: John D. Hannah

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RAR 5:3 (Summer 1996) p. 71

The Cure of Souls; or, Pastoral Counseling: The Insight of John Owen

John Hannah

The annals of Christian history witness to a rich heritage of concern and compassion for the troubled. The term that was used to express pastoral care in previous centuries was “the cure of souls”; its more contemporary designation is counseling. 1 The rise of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on the role of the individual and the importance of the mind or reason as the final arbiter of truth (i.e., a focus on the internal, subjective self rather than imposed external authority such as either the church or the Bible), brought profound changes in the methodology and content of advice-giving. Because it established insight into malevolent motives and their remedy in pre-Christian sources, the emerging movement became a powerful rival to the traditional views offered by pastors.

In the matter of counseling service, there appear to be two crucial and underlying questions. First, an accounting for the person’s plight is important. Here the issue is the discovery or perception of the fountainhead of the client’s or parishioner’s dilemma. What causes a person to manifest certain negative behavorial traits? Second, a perception of the methodology of behavior modification is vital. Here the question is about change and how it is brought to fruition. What is a person capable of doing? How can a person be directed to change?

In the search for answers to these fundamental questions (i.e., the cause of man’s behavior and the mechanism of behavioral modification) a wide variety of solutions have made their way into publication. Secular psychologists, whether they be behaviorists, psychoanalysts, personalists, or transpersonalists, have identified the root of behavioral dysfunction in any variety of external and internal factors. John Watson and B. F. Skinner rejected the role of the

RAR 5:3 (Summer 1996) p. 72

unconscious as the determinant of behavior to suggest that actions are a function of social influences. Freud, followed by Adler and Jung, argued that the key to behavior patterns was in the realm of the unconscious (i.e., the world of memory). For Carl Rogers, a personalist, the catalyst is the quest for the true, deeper self. In Maslow’s transpersonal terminology, it is the human quest for self-realization or self-actualization, a labyrinthine journey into the self. In each case, and the variety of psychological explanations of behavior are myriad, the roots of dysfunction are to be found in external forces that have come upon the client for which he is the involuntary victim; the solution, other than the environmental or statist behaviorism,...

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