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The Living Human Web: A Twenty-five Year Retrospective

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Abstract

This article traces developments in the 25-year history of a metaphor that has shaped the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century discipline of pastoral theology in the United States. It looks back at the ‘living human document’ as a pivotal image and then identifies three trends behind the appearance of the ‘living human web,’ its key attributes, four divergent ways the metaphor has been used, and tasks ahead. The article argues that while the living human document addressed the challenge of irrelevant theology, the living human web responded to the challenge of social injustice. But both metaphors share a common aim endemic to the discipline—to expand empathy, whether for the individual or the wider context, in order to respond to people in need.

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Notes

  1. See Bass et al. (2016) for an exploration of this problem.

  2. Richard Cabot delivered this essay as a lecture at Newton Theological Institution in 1924, and it was first published in Survey Graphic in September 1925 and was reprinted in Cabot (1926).

  3. For an account of this history, see also Holifield (1990, p. 847). Patton (2000) sketches a lineage from William James to Boisen to Seward Hiltner (pp. 50–53), and Dykstra (2005, p. 229) surmises that Boisen borrowed the language of document from James’s concept documents humains without acknowledgment. See James (1982, p. 3). Miller (2007) names three prominent resources in pastoral theology that recognize Boisen’s importance: Nouwen (1968), Powell (1975), and Hiltner himself (1965).

  4. Field education also received a “major boost” (Miller 2007, p. 612) in the late 1950s when H. Richard Niebuhr, Daniel Day Williams, and James M. Gustafson (1956) published their influential study of theological education. Supported by a major Carnegie grant, they argued for the “centrality of field education” and urged seminaries to include it as part of their curriculum, leading to the creation of new accreditation standards in 1962 (Miller 2007, p. 612).

  5. Both Couture and I did doctorates at University of Chicago under Don Browning, but I studied in “religion and psychological studies” and Couture in a new area called “practical theology.” Our scholarship reflects this divergence, with Couture more focused on denominational and social policy and myself focused on the psychological.

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Acknowledgments

This essay was originally delivered as a lecture on November 18, 2017, in Seoul, South Korea, at a joint conference of the Korean Association of Christian Counseling and Psychology and the Korean Association of Pastoral Counselors. I am grateful to Dr. Hong In-Jong, president of the Korean Association of Pastoral Counselors, Dr. Kwon Soo-Young, president of the Korean Association of Christian Counseling and Psychology, and members of the host committee for the invitation, including Dr. Ha Jaesung and Dr. Ka Yohan for their gracious hospitality. The article draws on three essays published in an edited collection, Christian Theology in Practice: Discovering a Discipline (Miller-McLemore 2012, originally published in 1996, 2004, and 2008).

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    Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

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Miller-McLemore, B.J. The Living Human Web: A Twenty-five Year Retrospective. Pastoral Psychol 67, 305–321 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-018-0811-7

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