Pastoral Theology: An Inquiry

Written by David Deeks Reviewed By Derek J. Tidball

David Deeks recognizes that his approach to Pastoral Theology is not one that fits easily with the traditional approach to pastoral education. He compares the pastor to an artist and sees the aims of the pastor as to encourage people to make their own sense of their experience; as disclosing Christian meaning in life; as stimulating them to engage in their own conversation with the Christian tradition and to encourage holiness, which he defines as a commitment to infuse our interior lives and exterior world with love. He is acutely conscious that the contemporary world is largely secular and that the pastor cannot make assumptions that those with whom they converse believe that there is a God. The pastor’s task is to try to establish a conversation between the struggle for meaning and the Christian tradition.

Deeks believes that if that is to be done successfully much of the traditional approach to theology which is abstract and philosophical, dogmatic and doctrinal will be inappropriate. The search for points of contact will have to be much broader. He writes that ‘the pastor’s first calling … is to be human, to work with risk at an agenda that is as wide as life itself’ (p. 83). He encourages, therefore, a much greater use of words, deeds, imagination and feelings as a basic resource for pastoral care as well as a recognition of the contribution which can be made by the human and social sciences.

The book has some positive contributions to make. There is much which is stimulating and much that evangelicals need to hear. For example, its realism is commendable. It seems to relate to men and women searching for meaning in life, whose experience of God or whose religious experience is only marginal at best. He is concerned to put the quest for professionalism in pastoral care in perspective so that we do give fairer expression to love. He clearly wants to rescue ‘the person’ from the merely intellectual concern of much theology. As he begins to put flesh on the bones he has identified, he writes very helpfully about the human personality, the leadership of groups and the role of leadership in various situations.

But in the end the basic approach is one with which evangelicals would have difficulties. He admits this, saying that many would hold assumptions in direct conflict with the methods he has described. Among them he names ‘Those who exalt the Bible or the theological tradition above all other resources in the struggle to make sense of life and to act lovingly in the world’ (p. 250). The debate about our starting-point and approach is crucial to pastoral theology, as the reviewer has detailed in Skilful Shepherds (IVP). The result of the approach Deeks, and others like Michael Taylor, adopt is not one that can give us confidence that we shall be able to lead people to the God who has revealed himself.

Much of Deeks’ writing was imaginative and illuminating. The medium chosen matched the message he sought to convey. But the reader would have been helped by more signposts or summaries throughout the book.


Derek J. Tidball

Plymouth