In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

35 Chapter 1 A Relational Understanding of Persons What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God/the gods and crowned them with glory and honor. —Psalm 8:4-5 ALL THEOLOGY, but especially pastoral theology, begins with human beings, and in particular, the pain and brokenness of the human condition (and indeed, all creation ). Pastoral theology takes suffering as its starting place1 —in Jürgen Moltmann’s words, “the open wound of life in this world.”2 The classic pastoral functions, as articulated in the mid-twentieth century, and amended in recent decades, immerse the pastoral theologian directly in this open wound, through a commitment to ministries of healing, sustaining, guiding, reconciling, nurturing, empowering, and liberating.3 As Emmanuel Lartey has articulated from a multicultural pastoral counseling perspective, “pastoral care expresses human concern through various helping activities including counseling but also celebrating, commemorating, rejoicing , reflecting, mourning, and being present.”4 A postmodern pastoral perspective, moreover, recognizes that all pastoral encounters will involve a process of co-creating of psychological, cultural, and theological meanings. Carrie Doehring5 has enumerated a postmodern set of criteria for moving within the multiplicity of traditions and approaches available. These include evaluations of their (1) contextual meaningfulness (opening rather than simplifying and closing down the complexity of religious, spiritual, and psychological experiences), (2) interdisciplinary meaningfulness (creating space for a lively correlational dialogue between theological and psychological perspectives—I would add the wider social sciences and other secular disciplines), and (3) pragmatic usefulness6 (contributing to care and justice, rather than remaining at a level of theoretical abstraction). Taking human persons as the starting point is a reversal of more traditional theological approaches, in which an image of God is posited, and from that image, a theological anthropology is developed—following perhaps the reasoning that if God is prior to human beings as the Creator, and human beings are created in the 36 MANY VOICES “image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:26, 27), then it makes sense to describe God first. Theologians thus have historically begun their systematic inquiries with the nature of God, drawing on revelation from scripture, which is given a priori status as divinely inspired truth, and/or on tradition—the accrual of doctrine over time. Theological anthropology, that is, the theologically informed study of the nature of human beings, has always been addressed second, after the question of God’s nature. All descriptions of God, however, are human fabrications,7 whether their authors acknowledge this or not, and most theologies carry an unconscious ideal image of the human as the template for a superhuman God. Particular formulations about God are, further, framed in terms of their particular historical and cultural inheritance, including the central symbol systems, of their framers.8 Cultural norms further tend to predicate and provide cognitive frameworks for how people will (or will not) interpret and ascribe certain anomalous affect states as “religious experiences .”9 The philosopher Immanuel Kant insisted on the limits of human reason and knowledge, in critique of René Descartes’s search for some rationally certain foundation for truth. Following Kant and Martin Heidegger, postmodern writers who have addressed the idea of “God” as idea (such as Emmanuel Lévinas,10 Jacques Derrida,11 Julia Kristeva,12 Luce Irigaray,13 Jean-Luc Marion,14 and Grace Jantzen15 ) have further critiqued any absolute metaphysical construct of God, or “onto-theology.”16 Such metaphysical constructs inevitably fall back on human categories , often while ignoring or mystifying the human limitations of such constructs by calling them unquestionable as belonging to divine “revelation.” (Much more will be said about these critiques and elaborations in chapter 2.) I would therefore argue that the human origin of all theologies extends to all portrayals of God, including biblical ones. Even for those of us as Christians who subscribe to a belief in the Bible as divine revelation, that revelation still had to be filtered through the available images and metaphors of its scribes and redactors, through their imaginative use of language and of oral tradition, and it continues to be filtered further through the lenses of its readers, both historical and contemporary .17 Sallie McFague has made cogent arguments regarding the metaphorical nature of theology, particularly in the imaging and naming of God.18 Psychoanalytic studies of the unconscious origins of individuals’ God imagoes in the internalized figures of one’s parents from earliest childhood19 further reinforce...

Share