Gregory the Great wrote The Pastoral Rule to provide guidance for “spiritual directors” (clergy) on the responsibilities and tasks of pastoring. It is widely considered one of the best works of pastoral theology.
He breaks his work into four parts.
He addresses the qualifications of those who would obtain pastoral authority.
He provides directions on the proper life and work of the pastor.
He offers specific guidance and insight on how to pastor particular types of people given their unique temperaments, struggles, characteristics, and circumstances.
He closes with an exhortation to humility in pastoral ministry.
He sets out to write his book, among other reasons, “to express my opinion of the severity of their weight [i.e., the burdens of pastoral care] so that he who is free of these burdens might not recklessly pursue them and he who has already attained them might tremble for having done so.”1 At the close of his book, he says, “I have tried to show what the qualities of a spiritual director ought to be.”2
The following are some of my favorite quotes from the work, organized loosely by subject matter.3
1. The dangers of the pastoral authority
“No one does more harm in the Church than he who has the title or rank of holiness and acts perversely. … [B]ecause such a sinner is honored by the dignity of his rank, his offenses spread considerably by way of example. And yet everyone who is unworthy would flee from such a great burden of guilt if, with the attentive ear of the heart, he pondered the saying of the Truth: ‘He that scandalizes one of these little ones who believes in me, it would be better for him that a millstone was hung around his neck and that he was cast into the depth of the sea.’ … Whoever, therefore, gives off the appearance of sanctity but destroys another by his words or example, it would be better for him that his earthly acts, demonstrated by worldly habits, would bind him to death than for his sacred office to be a source for the imitation of vice in another. Indeed, his punishment in hell would be less terrible if he fell alone.” (32)
“[Jesus] chose instead the penalty of a shameful death so that his [followers] might also learn to flee the applause of the world, to fear not its terrors, to value adversity for the sake of truth, and to decline prosperity fearfully. This final concern [i.e. prosperity] often corrupts the heart through pride, while adversities purge it through suffering. In the one, the soul becomes conceited; while in the other (even if the soul is occasionally conceited), it humbles itself. In the one, the man forgets who he is; while in the other, he is recalled, even unwillingly, to know what he is. … For commonly in the school of adversity, the heart is subdued by discipline; but if one rises to a position of spiritual authority, the heart is immediately altered by a state of elation that accompanies the experience of glory.” (33)
What is the message of Ecclesiastes, and how should we interpret this puzzling book? In this episode of Logos Live, I talk with Bobby Jamieson about his new book, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness.
The following is from Harold L. Senkbeil, “Leading Your Sheep,” in Pastoral Leadership: For the Care of Souls, Lexham Ministry Guides (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), 54–56.
“The Bible, however, makes a clear distinction between authorized power and unauthorized power. The only legitimate way to do ministry is by way of the authority of Jesus: doing what he’s given you to do. … Many unfortunate dysfunctions arise when power is confused with authority. When pastors operate not out of their divinely commissioned authority but rather out of their private opinions and desires, conflict usually occurs. …
This works for a while; it may even work for quite a while, depending on the strength of the pastor’s personality. But you can see that it’s a strategy fraught with danger. It breeds resentment and discontent within a congregation for sure, and often these situations get ugly. People may suffer silently for a while, but eventually their resentment spills over into open resistance and rebellion. Now you’ve got a power struggle and contest of wills on your hands, as the pastor keeps trying to outsmart the opposition and form allegiances among his fans against his enemies. It’s a powder keg situation politically speaking. And you know for sure you’re in for trouble when the church is viewed increasingly from a political point of view.
So when you do ministry by power, you’ve got a potential brouhaha on your hands organizationally speaking. Worst of all, where pastor and people lock horns in a political power struggle, a church is collectively delivered into the hands of the great politician, the great power broker: Satan.”
The following is an excerpt from Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 129–133 where he discusses Benjamin Franklin’s edit to the draft of the Declaration of Independence. His edit shows the nature in which Christian convictions, that have not otherwise been accepted as “self-evident” throughout much of human history and in other cultures, came to be taken for granted because of Christianity’s influence.
In short, the West lives on borrowed Christian morality. Human rights are not so obvious, as we have now come to think.
This section from Andrew Wilson is worth quoting at length:
Two weeks before Boswell’s visit to Hume, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Franklin asking him to edit the Declaration of Independence in time for a meeting the following morning. “The inclosed paper has been read and with some small alterations approved of by the committee,” Jefferson explained. “Will Doctr. Franklyn be so good as to peruse it and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?”
Franklin was at home recovering from gout and made very few changes. But one of them would have epochal significance. Jefferson had originally written that “we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” Franklin crossed out the last three words and replaced them with one: “self-evident.”
It was a portentous edit. Jefferson’s version, despite his theological skepticism, presented the equality of men and the rights they held as grounded in religion: they are “undeniable” because they are “sacred” truths that originate with the Creator. By contrast, Franklin’s version grounded them in reason. They are “self-evident” truths, which are not dependent on any particular religious tradition but can easily be grasped as logically necessary by anyone who thinks about them for long enough.
To which the obvious response is: no, they are not. There are plenty of cultures in which it is not remotely self-evident to people that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, let alone that these rights include life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the prerogative to abolish any government that does not preserve them. Most human beings in 1776 did not believe that at all, which is partly why the Declaration was required in the first place. (This accounts for the otherwise inexplicable phrase “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” as opposed to saying simply “these truths are self-evident.”) Some of the founders had not quite believed it themselves just fifteen years earlier. Billions of people today still don’t.
The fundamental equality of human beings, and their endowment with inalienable rights by their Creator, are essentially theological beliefs. They are neither innately obvious axioms nor universally accepted empirical truths nor rational deductions from things that are. There is no logical syllogism that begins with undeniable premises and concludes with “all people are equal” or “humans have God-given rights.” The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov expressed the non sequitur at the heart of Western civilization with a deliciously sarcastic aphorism: “Man descended from apes, therefore we must love one another.”
Many of us find this unsettling. We are inclined to see equality and human rights as universal norms, obvious to everyone who can think for themselves. But in reality they are culturally conditioned beliefs that depend on fundamentally Christian assumptions about the world. Friedrich Nietzsche made this point with angry brilliance: the obsession with alleviating the suffering of the weak and marginalized, within an ethical framework that valorizes humility, fairness, charity, equality, and freedom (as opposed to nobility, pride, courage, and power), is the result of the “slave morality” introduced by Christianity, with its crucified Savior and its claims about weak things being chosen to shame the strong. Coming from a very different angle, Yuval Noah Harari shows how human rights, likewise, have no foundation if they are not rooted in Christian anthropology. “There are no such things as rights in biology,” he explains. Expressed in biological terms, the Declaration of Independence would read very differently: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.”
Jefferson was right the first time. Equality and human rights are “sacred” truths, not “self-evident” ones. They are irreducibly theological, grounded in specifically Judeo-Christian beliefs about God and his creation of humans in his image, and there is no particular reason why societies with different theological foundations should not reach very different conclusions. Many have.
… Franklin’s brief, scribbled correction is a marvelous metaphor for the ex-Christian West. His replacement of the words “sacred and undeniable” with “self-evident” echoes what was happening across European society as a whole in 1776, at least among elites. It was an attempt to retain Christianity’s moral conclusions while scrubbing out its theological foundations: keeping the fruits while severing the roots, if you will. And it resulted in the insistence that Judeo-Christian convictions on anthropology and ethics were now to be regarded as universal norms on which all reasonable people would agree. … [Ben Franklin’s] edit is a lasting witness to the fact that the modern West is not so much ex-Christian, in the sense of having renounced Christ and all his works, as it is abidingly and distinctively ex-Christian. Contingent religious beliefs now sound like self-evident secular truths.
Kirk E. Miller 