The Consolation of Israel

During the Middle Ages there was a superstitious regard for fourteen saints as the “defenders from all evils.” They were called the fourteen of consolation, and silver tablets with their images were placed above the altars in the churches. Spiritual comfort became a matter of gaining (through prayers and penitential works) the protection of these saints for they were revealed—in a vision to a Franconian shepherd—to have power over diseases and evils of various kinds.

When Frederick the Wise was stricken in 1519 with a serious illness from which there seemed little hope of recovery, an Augustinian at Wittenberg, brother Martin Luther, served as his intercessor by preparing a little treatise of spiritual comfort which he called The Fourteen of Consolation. As over against the medieval saints Luther substituted fourteen other defenders and arranged them artificially as an altar tablet, only, instead of this being of silver, it is constructed of the Word of God. Here in this area of pastoral care Luther just as radically departed from medieval superstition and works-righteousness as he did in every other area of church life. Instead of offering pastoral comfort by appealing to the saints, Luther brings to his patient the Word of God in all its truth and purity. And a living Word it is, sharper than any two-edged sword, cutting in order to cure, hurting in order to heal, and slaying in order to make alive!

Modern Magic Rites

It is a curious little treatise, curious to an age in which the passwords to life are motivational research, interpersonal relationships, and togetherness. One must realize, of course, that one may lose entré into the select coterie by not reading the latest issues of the sociological and psychiatric journals. After all it was only yesterday that the elite vocabulary included such magic words as organization man and other-directed society. And was it the day before yesterday or the day before that that we were all talking about inferiority complexes and power drives and the libidinous urges of the ego in the sublimal recesses of human subconsciousness? Luther’s approach to pastoral care was quite different.

When we consider what we have gone through in the past 50 years we are reminded of Kierkegaard’s Professor who desperately had to have the truth: “Is Jesus the Lord of my life,” he asks, “or is he an impostor?” And so he goes to Pilate, and he spreads out his handkerchief so as not to soil his knees as he bends before the procurator to ask his desperate question, but just then someone hastens into the court with a new piece of evidence. It seems that Jesus is a Nazarene and therefore outside the jurisdiction of Pilate. The Professor then rushes to Herod to see if the king of Galilee can give him a final decision on the Lord of his life. But just as he is spreading his handkerchief Herod is reminded that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and so he is a Judean under Pilate after all. Once more the Professor scurries to Pilate only to reach into his pocket for his handkerchief and then hear Pilate say: “I find no fault in this man. He is a Jew. See to him for yourselves!” And so the Professor is tossed from Herod to Pilate and from Pilate to Herod and he never gets a final word on this desperate matter because the world is always bringing in new evidence. And here we are 2,000 years later still being interrupted by Bedouin shepherds poking their noses into abandoned caves or by bright young medics with new techniques on child rearing, and always someone is whispering into the ear of Pilate or Herod and upsetting the court. Yet we desperately need the Truth!

The Control Of Persons

Let us just for curiosity go back and see what Luther said in his Fourteen of Consolation. There he shows us the many evils that beset us on all sides, but he consoles us in that the evil we bear is demonstrated to be nothing compared with the evil which is borne by our friends to the right or our enemies to the left and especially by Christ above us. “Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me.” And after facing evil squarely Luther moves to a positive approach in which he shows us the many blessings which come to us from all sides, from within and before and behind, and to the right, and to the left, and from below, and from above. And always it is Christ the living Lord who is both the answer to evil and the content of blessing.

This proclamation of the living Word was Luther’s pastoral care in answer to the superstitious magic of holy relics and the legalism of the confessional booth. I submit that this same Word must be our answer to the Freudian superstition and the behavioristic magic of our own day. Both of these philosophies parade in the guise of science and as such they claim to have a corner on the truth. But when it comes to relations between persons, which is the kind of thing that concerns us in pastoral care, scientific knowledge is not only inadequate but dangerously deceptive.

Science, whether it is Freud’s analysis or Dewey’s experimentalism or any of the newer revisions of these views, must necessarily deal with its subject as if he were an object. To know in the scientific sense means ultimately to have power over, it means to control, it means to predict and then arrange conditions to gain a desired result. This is a highly valuable kind of knowing but it is only fully valid for things. It is only partially valid for living organisms since any living thing is more than a physicochemical event even though Huxley dourly says that man is nothing but a protoplasmic agglomerate on the way to becoming fertilizer. And when this kind of scientific knowing is applied to persons it is not only invalid but to seek it is positively immoral! This we must never do in pastoral care. We must never seek to control, have power over, or even influence, for to do so is not to know our neighbor but merely to name him, and it is not to love our neighbor but merely to use him. In pastoral care we are concerned with an altogether different kind of knowing. As W. H. Auden says: “To the degree that it is possible to know a person in the scientific sense he is not a person.… Propaganda, commercial or political, and much that passes under the name of scientific psychology and education are immoral because they deliberately try to keep human beings on or reduce them to a subpersonal level at which they can be scientifically controlled, and it is no longer possible to know them in the poetic sense.”

Nothing Is Hidden

In pastoral care we must learn to know one another in the sense of the psalmist when he says: “O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; thou discernest my thoughts from afar.… For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.… Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.”

Before such knowing we can understand why the poet could cry in anguish: “I fled him down the nights and down the days; I fled him down the arches of the years; I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind and in the mist of tears I hid from him.” But where can the soul hide from the hound of heaven? As Luther says in his Commentary on Romans: “God going out from himself brings it about that we go into ourselves; and making himself known to us, he makes us known to ourselves.” First we must understand that God knows us as we really are, more intimately than we can ever know ourselves. Before him we stand naked with no fustian robe or tinselled diadem to hide our shame, no sensitive radar screen to warn us of God’s coming, and no scented cosmetics to deceive him when he comes. He knows us before we speak and he knows us in our inward parts.

And secondly we must understand that God knows us in the sense that he is mindful of us. This indeed is the consolation of Israel for it means that God visits us in his Son. This is a salvatory kind of knowing, while the first kind of knowing is a judging kind. Notice how many meanings the word mindful has. We speak of a mother minding her child and we mean that she cares for the child in loving sacrifice. We also speak of the child minding his parents and we mean that the child is obedient. We speak of a man being mindful of some future event and we mean that his mind is full of the knowledge of the anticipated moment. In every case we are dealing with knowledge, not in the scientific sense but in the biblical sense, for which we might say the symbol is: “And Adam knew his wife Eve.” What a wealth of understanding there is in the knowledge of such a personal relationship!

The Word Of Reconciliation

Such must be the knowledge in care, the knowledge in obedience, the knowledge in mindfulness, and the knowledge in loving trust in all our pastoral relationships. Only a relationship of knowledge in Christ can bring the consolation that brought tears of joy to the eyes of old Simeon when he sang, “For mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel.” And such a relationship will do the two things of which Luther spoke: free us from all evils and unite us in blessed reconciliation with God our Father.

Christ, the living Word, is then the defender from evil, and not the techniques and gimmicks of an anthropocentric methodology. The modern man is looking for adjustment or acceptance because he finds himself to be alone in an unfriendly society. Consequently we develop techniques which will manipulate both the individual and society in the direction of acceptance. Inevitably, however, this manipulation destroys the person by appealing to the selfish ego instead of driving out the old Adam to make room for Christ. If the sickness of the soul is to be diagnosed we must do it in terms of the Word of God, and in that Word we find our trouble to be nothing less than a warring in our members due to the death struggle between Christ and Satan. Not simple psychiatrics with all its arbitrary symbolism and allegory but the earth-shaking conflict between two kingdoms is at stake here.

And also, Christ, the living Word, brings us into a living, creative communion with one another as members of his body the Church. Too long we have been thinking of pastoral counselling as the role of the unctuous individual practitioner who brings soothing soul therapy to a number of other individuals who are somewhat less than unctuous. Soon we must learn that pastor and people belong through one Spirit to one body. All our pastoral care must then center in the sacrament of the Church where we participate in the body and blood of Christ. It is not by the talk of any old words that happen to spill out of us, whether from pastor or from people, whether by direction or nondirection, that we are saved; it is by the Word of God and this Word becomes flesh for us in the sacrament. Here we become free both from the past and for the present and future, because in this great entrance of the elements as the ancient liturgies used to sing, Christ is here among us, he is and he will be! If he is here, then we are free from all enemies both past and present; if he will come, then we are free from all dangers in future. Because Christ has come we can be holy, and because he will come we must be holy. This is both our consolation and our exhortation.

Robert Paul Roth is Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of New Testament Theology at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary. He served for some years as Professor in Luthergiri Seminary, Rajahmundry, India. He holds the M. A. from University of Illinois, B. D. from Northwestern Lutheran Seminary, and Ph. D. from University of Chicago.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.