Anton Boisen and the Case Method in Pastoral Care

Pastoral theology's characteristic modern method did not come from a seminary classroom but from a psychiatric hospital ward. Anton Boisen, a Protestant minister who was himself hospitalized for a psychotic episode in 1920, concluded afterward that ministers were being trained to counsel from books and sermons while remaining largely untested in front of an actual person in crisis. He argued that a suffering human being should be studied with the same close, disciplined attention a seminary gave to a biblical text, a claim usually summarized in his own phrase describing a person in crisis as a living human document.

Working from that conviction, Boisen helped found what became the Clinical Pastoral Education movement in the 1920s, placing seminary students directly into hospitals and psychiatric wards under supervision, where they wrote detailed case reports on their pastoral encounters and had those reports reviewed alongside their peers, much as a medical student's clinical work is reviewed. The method shifted pastoral theology's center of gravity from doctrine applied in the abstract to a discipline reasoning from documented encounters with real suffering, and Clinical Pastoral Education style training modeled on Boisen's original method remains a standard requirement for chaplaincy certification and much pastoral formation across traditions today.