Man's Ministry to man

Abstract

The ministry of man to man involves three basic necessities, whether we are speaking of the clergyman, the general practitioner, the psy chiatrist, the psychologist, the social worker, the teacher, the nurse, the educational or vocational counselor, or any of the numerous other helping professions. The first necessity is a working knowledge of the nature of man in its physical, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions. Our age is moving away from the description of human nature as composed of two distinct entities, mind and body, a description that has dominated Western thought from the time of the seventeenth-century thinker, Ren? Descartes. Descartes taught that the body is a machine and can be studied, described, and understood by the ordinary methods of natural science. The mind, on the other hand, he regarded as an immaterial and supernatural principle dwelling in the body but not subject to study and examination along scientific lines. The results of this position have been that science has restricted itself to the study of physical phenomena and tended to regard all other studies as unscientific. Only very recently, as the burgeoning concern with human be havior has drawn many disciplines together in the study of man's body, mind, and feelings, have we come to see that the separation of mind and body is more formal and theoretical than it is real and practical. The distinguished biologist Ren? Dubos writes in his book, The Torch of Life (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1962, p. 10) : "Is it really true . . . that the body and the mind are two distinct en tities? Or are they merely two different manifestations of the integrated structures which make a living organism? There is at present no con clusive evidence to decide between these two alternatives so fundamen