A Theological Assessment of Spiritual Assessments

Abstract

Spiritual care within secular, pluralistic health care settings cannot be separated from particular theological claims. This claim is based on four arguments: (1) Practical-clinical questions concerning the role of spirituality and religion in healthcare are laden theological debates. (2) All spiritual assessments, including narrative-based methods and functional assessment tools, have embedded theological norms that fail to solve pluralism. (3) Future models of spiritual assessment and care can be constructively developed based on a correlation between contemporary health care settings and substantive Christian approaches. (4) Questions about how to practically provide spiritual care must also include theological evaluation of secular medicine. Consequently, spiritual assessment requires particular, tradition-mediated understandings. Future spiritual care models must simultaneously balance the irreducible pluralism of health care, the inescapable particularity of the theological traditions guiding our institutions and social systems, and the overwhelming spiritual needs experienced by patients facing life-threatening illness.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.