In this book Andrew Purves argues that pastoral care has lost its historical moorings. That instead of theology, psychology is now the discipline that is driving pastoral care. In particular, he believes that a concern about our vertical relationship with God has been eclipsed by concerns about our horizontal relationships with others and our internal relationship with ourself. This, he believes, is why we have lost confidence in the efficacy of the Word and why psychological self-fulfilment matters more to us than salvation.

Contemporary pastoral care, according to Purves, has taken on such a man-centred slant that it would be unrecognisable to previous generations. For that reason, he has produced this survey of pastoral theology in the classical tradition, which he hopes will ‘provoke us into critical thinking by disturbing our calm, culture-bound assumptions concerning ministry’ (115).

Five authors are chosen for review: Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Martin Bucer and Richard Baxter. In five relatively short chapters, Purves provides a brief biographical sketch before exploring some of the main themes in their theology, and their pastoral theology in particular. By quoting extensively from their own writings, he tries to let these pastors speak for themselves.

‘Flight to Pontus’ is Gregory of Nazianzus’ apologetic defence explaining his own struggle to accept the call to pastoral ministry. Purves believes that his sense of the almost intolerably heavy responsibility of pastoral ministry functions as ‘a spiritual health warning’ over every candidate for holy orders and that ‘no one ought to enter who has not deeply examined motive and ability’. Certainly Gregory’s conviction that God will hold pastors accountable for the souls given into their care is a note rarely sounded today. In Chrysostom, Purves finds a pastor with a passion for personal piety. A man who set the highest standards of personal morality convinced that he could not be an effective pastor otherwise. Gregory the Great also emphasised the importance of personal spiritual growth and aligned it with a compassion for people. In fact it is clear that Gregory possessed exceptional psychological insight long before psychologists had been invented! Bucer, a ‘largely undiscovered’ pastoral theologian insisted that ‘the focus of pastoral care is the life of persons before God’, not their ‘inward states’. According to Purves, he:

speaks an urgent word to pastors today to return with diligence to a pastoral practice that it built upon the whole Word of God, and which is thereby both evangelical in theology and evangelistic in practice (90).

Finally, in Baxter, Purves finds an emphasis on the pastor’s need to attend to their own relationship to God, to make conversion their pastoral goal and to take heed to the whole flock.

It is important that the insights of this book are heard today. They are all the more poignant for being found in the writings of these classical authors. A sense that, for all our psychological sophistication, we have lost something essential about pastoring is inescapable. In the concluding part of the book Purves begins to sketch out what contemporary pastoral care in this classical tradition might look like and there are important lessons for every pastor. Again and again we need to ask how it is that so many theological essentials have been set aside in favour of psychological secondaries.

The concluding analysis is briefer than I would have liked and the whole tone of the book assumes a distinction between clergy and laity that many will want to question, but if it was Purves aim to disturb our calm and cause us ‘to pause, to ponder, and to reflect in a critical way about our actions today as pastors’, then he has achieved it.

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