| At the beginning of the 21st century Pastoral Counseling faces worldwide new challenges. If the social-philosophical and social-psychological analyses are right and we in fact live at present in globally cross-linked, risky, multi-optional, experiential and flexible multi-cultural and multi-religious societies, that are marked by compelling their members to construct their own (religious) identity (Beck, Schulze, Gross, Sennett, Lyotard, Keupp), if therefore every individual may or rather has to organize his or her life in a system of coordinates of seemingly unlimited possibilities and mercilessily dictated individual and structural limits, if whole groups of human beings are deprived of their right of surviving, and if religious views cause psychiatric symptoms or induce people to stick to fundamental thinking and action, all this must have effects on the theory and practice of Pastoral Counseling. Therefore practical theologians all around the world strive with an up to now unseen intensity for a new paradigm of Pastoral Counseling. By my research project I therefore mainly pursue three aims: 1st To identify the outlines of a multidimensional notion of Pastoral Counseling from a particularly Dutch perspective and to introduce them as further impulses into the international paradigm discussion. 2nd To develop professional skills of Pastoral Counselors in the direction of an equally multidimensional profile of competence and role. 3rd To increase the credibility/trustworthiness and the attractivity of Christian belief as well as of the Christian churches in post-modern societies. The concept of Multidimensional Pastoral Counseling will be rooted in a radical consideration of the two thousand years old tradition of Christian belief that was handed down in writing and verbally; and it will be rooted in the same way in a radical consideration of the complex life contexts of present people. Pastoral Counseling is supposed to be classified as multidimensional, because the Christian notion of God and man standing behind it requires that the care for the soul of man should always be the care for the whole human being, the care for a life in abundance in spite of all its frailty and finiteness (John 10:10). The most crucial aspect of this is the interrelatedness between that notion of tradition and present contextuality. The psycho-material, spiritual and social dimension of the human existence must never be played off against each other. Multidimensionality thus requires to take into account in an elementary way the theologically, (psycho-)therapeutically and sociologically gained insights and methods. |
