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The study is to show that worship symbols might damage its purpose to express the holiness of God, when they are abused by the human will to power. The author presupposes that the essence of Christian worship is to reveal the holiness of God. All the symbols of Christian liturgy are supposed to serve that essential purpose. The author, however, suspects that such an intention might operate as a superficial pretext for the other hidden intention. It is, the author calls, ‘the human will to power,’ which means a deep desire for self-glorification through getting the self-centered power to dominate others. Unfortunately, the author argues, the liturgical symbols of Christian worship can provide one of the most dangerous opportunities for realizing the human will to power. For this critical argument, the author uses mainly two methodological approaches: a semiotic analysis and an ethnographic participatory observation. For the semiotic analysis, the author takes three stages. First, she translates the ‘holiness’ of God into the theological categories of ‘transcendence,’ ‘consecration,’ and ‘awe.’ Next, these are made to correspond to their distorted categories: exclusion, discrimination, and oppression. Lastly, the inter-relationship of the two category groups is analyzed in terms of the four semiotic forms: space, time, visual symbol, and language. The author has applied the semiotic analytic tools to observing, describing, and interpreting the actual symbolic operations of 10 Korean church worship services. The author selected the ten churches by some rigorous criteria and participated in each worship to observe it personally. The author’s semiotic interpretations of the observed and analyzed have demonstrated how seriously the worship symbols, consciously or unconsciously, serve the human will to power, distorting the holiness of God ironically in the name of the holiness of God. The study helps to discover and understand what are hidden below facial phenomena, which general sociological approaches cannot point out. The weak point of the study is that the researcher’s subjective interpretation binds it. The author must accept that criticism while defending that all studies cannot transcend their own hermeneutic horizons.

The purpose of this paper began with my motivation to correct the modern misunderstanding of sanctification. For this study, I reviewed Wesley's emphasis on the content of sanctification through the Beatitudes sermon. In the Beatitudes sermon, Wesley stressed three aspects of sanctification theory. To this end, I first outlined the characteristics of Wesley's theory of sanctification, the contents of which are as follows; Wesley viewed the state of sanctification as a 'relationship' with God or 'motivation' or 'intention' within humans, and an important characteristic of the experience of instantaneousness of sanctification is that it is made possible by faith. And Wesley saw that this sanctification goes beyond the individual level and spreads to the whole society. The main contents and structure of Wesley's Sermon on the Mount are as follows; Part 1 dealt with the sermon on the Beatitudes, Chapter 5 of Matthew, and Part 2 is based on Chapter 6 of Matthew, and in the previous chapter, I emphasized inner purity in doing righteousness, same as inner holiness. Part 3 is Chapter 7 of the Gospel of Matthew, which specifically presented the factors that interfered with maintaining this sanctification. In particular, I dealt with Wesley's sermons 1-3, which correspond to the Beatitudes, which can be said to be a summary of the Sermon on the Mount, from the point of view of sanctification. In the next chapter of this paper, the writer suggested the following three characteristics in Wesley's Beatitudes sermon as a solution to today's various distorted beliefs about holiness; 1) The sanctification that the Bible says is not a sanctification of outward but of inward, which is a thorough circumcision of one's inner self before God. 2) The power of true sanctification is not a hermitic piety, but a social sanctification that always bears fruit not a sanctification of seclusive but of social in the neighborhood and society. 3) This sanctification is awakened not through the subjectivity of man himself, but in the encounter with the infinite God and the neighbor as the other. The three characteristics of sanctification mentioned above in Wesley's Beatitudes sermon are the core of the theory of sanctification that penetrates the entire Old and New Testaments, not just the Beatitudes or the Sermon on the Mount. Therefore, all Christian leaders and believers are required to have a correct understanding of the three characteristics of the sanctification theory in Wesley's Beatitudes sermon for the church and society that are confused and wandering today without finding the true value of holiness.

This study focuses on relationality, namely, that Pentecostal orthodoxy exists in and for an intimate relationship with God. The purpose of this chapter is not to explain Pentecostal doctrinal beliefs and the system of doctrines; rather, I aim to elucidate the relational characteristics in Pentecostal beliefs, namely the fourfold Gospel. The hypothesis of this study is that the Pentecostal understanding of orthodoxy is relational because Pentecostal beliefs, which reciprocally interact with orthopathy and orthopraxy in relationality, reach deep into union with God through the works of Christ and the Spirit. To substantiate this claim, I suggest a theological approach to relationality of orthodoxy as a model of authentic Pentecostal beliefs in spirituality. The fourfold Christocentric gospel represents the core beliefs of Pentecostals. The fivefold gospel is not just a pattern for formulating Pentecostal doctrine; rather it is authentic beliefs for ‘a way of living’. In this study, I highlight specific relational features of Pentecostal beliefs not only in relationship with God but also in relationship with others, as they are revealed in the fourfold gospel. By doing so, I substantiate the claim that Pentecostal beliefs are integrated in relationality for union with God. However, when reconfiguring Pentecostal doctrinal beliefs in relationality, my analysis shows that Pentecostal beliefs tend not only to emphasize Christology rather than pneumatology but also to focus on atomistic rather than holistic works of Christ and the Spirit. By doing so, this study will provide insight that Pentecostal doctrinal beliefs are Christocentric so that they need the addition of the pneumatic works for union with God.

This research aims to examine the psychological understanding of a prayer, particularly, how Winnicott’s theory can help explain Thomas Keating’s Centering prayer. Donald Winnicott reinterprets the psychological place of religion by introducing the concept of ‘transitional object’ and ‘transitional phenomena.’ The third area between dream and reality is a creative and mystic place of connection with God. His approach focusing on the relationship between inner self and the external world, still shows spiritual insight. As Meissner’s argument, it is essential for man to “revive the roots of his capacity for creative living and for faith experience” in the transitional area. Also, Winnicott’s the ideas of True Self and False Self offers insightful psychological understandings of religious activities in the individual psychic place. These concepts are essentially related to an individual’s religious life, which is an intermediate area between faith and reality. Thomas Keating explains that the‘True Self’ may be identified by Divine union during the centering prayer. The False Self can be transformed into the True Self through unloading the unconscious. The ideas of the True Self and False Self in Winnicott and Keating teach us to need of remaining the appropriate distances between True Self and False Self. Korean ministers should help church members to pray with one’s True Self. If our prayer is not based on voice of the True Self, our prayer can be a hypocritical formal and empty prayer of hypocrisy. Winnicott’s contribution that Korean church may function as a holding environment for Korean Christians and Korean society These lessons guide Korean churches to help to connect with God in the space of the True Self through prayer.

This research as a literature study was to clarify the futuristic aspect and analysis of the Biblical counseling. The purpose of this study is to discuss how biblical counseling has developed so far, what challenges it faces externally, what problems it faces internally, and what direction it should go in the future. Biblical counseling was developed by founder Jay E. Adams and operated under the so-called ‘nouthetic counseling,’ later changed its name to ‘biblical counseling’ and became known worldwide as a huge academic body that has amassed numerous sympathizers. Biblical counseling has made significant progress internally, but externally it has received harsh criticism from psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, and even Christian counseling. Biblical counseling has gone through the first and second-generations over the past 50 years. David Foulison, a representative of the second-generation of biblical counseling, passed away after raising the following issues about biblical counseling before his death. “Current Biblical counseling has become a situation where one has to discuss what challenges one faces externally, what problems one has internally, and what direction on should move forward.” To address these discussions, this study briefly dealt with the history of generational change in biblical counseling. And this researcher briefly looked at the contents of biblical counseling. In addition, this study, titled ‘The Structure of Biblical Counseling,’ dealt with the biblical hermeneutic basis, the sufficiency of the Bible, and the relationship with sin. Also, in this research, Pawlison's 12 biblical counseling propositions were dealt with as the contents and methods of biblical counseling. Finally, three issues were addressed regarding the direction of biblical counseling in the future. In other words, it concludes by dealing with biblical counseling beyond confrontation and criticism, biblical counseling for cultural expansion, and biblical counseling to accommodate various biblical counseling approaches.

According to self psychology, selfobject is experienced as part of the self, and they are very important to develop healthy, cohesive self. A a child develops self in both ways(through grandiose self and idealized self), firstly by parent's empathic response. And if a child fails to get enough empathic response as selfobject from parents, his self become weak, or in worse, fragmented. So we cannot live without selfobject. Kohut says that the goal of cure is not to make autonomous self structure but build self ability to find appropriate selfobject and to use it, for stability and cohesiveness of self. Kohut also says that as an individual self, an organization can be a group self. In this vein, I'd like say that a church can be a self, also church life can supply empathic response to people who cannot have poorly empathic response from parents in early life, by the help of welcoming people, impressive services, soothing massages and bible studies. And I insist that God grant us the most profound and fundamental grace to develope cohesiveness of self, so we can experience grace as supreme empathic selfobject through maintaining, enhancing the relationship with God. I suggest pastors and pastoral counselors are to help people to experience grace as selfobject.

“What should the pastor be concerned about with regard to the psycho-spiritual development and maturation of the members in his congregation?”, “What are the conditions for a healthy church fellowship in modern society?” and “What kind of relationship should pastor and church members have?” There is a special relationship between the pastors and church members, which aims at the common goal of an existential-realistic ‘soul healing’. Although both realize the importance of mutual cooperation for the achievement of this goal, equality is not premised within this concept of ‘cooperation’. In other words, pastors and church members have different roles and functions within the church community. Of course, differences in roles and functions do not mean superiority or inferiority of the object. Nevertheless, pastors and church members acknowledge the inevitability and necessity of hierarchies within their relationships. In particular, church members expect unilateral care from the pastor and hope that the pastor will be ‘the subject of salvation of souls’. So, church members deny the pastor's real appearance and project a fantasy image of a stronger and more powerful being to the pastor-object, and furthermore, give a fictional-delusional value. Of course, each pastor has his own unique identity. However, church members believe that the pastor's identity has a great influence on their ‘soul care’. Due to the psychology of these church members, problems and conflicts are formed in the community, and a typical example is ‘pastor-idolization’. In this study, I try to understand the causes of pastor-idolization from a psychoanalytic dimension, and to seek solutions to the problems that arise. I will also classify the cause of occurrence into the dimension of the pastor and of the church members, and understand it in depth and in detail in connection with the desire of each object.

I began this study after finding that many counsel clients were having dysfunctional God-representation as the cause for their pain. God-representation is not innate one but the one to be acquired through experiences. Freud and religious psychologists proved that it is formed for a long time based on emotions experienced with their nurturers at childhood.For individual happiness and healthiness, the wrong psychological representations should be corrected. And those ranges include the self-representation, interpersonal representation and God representation. For the change of dysfunctional God representation, the individual’s psychological bruises should be cured, and their mind-structure should be re-organized. For such objective, in this study, I focused on Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology, and especially on selfobject concept. The selfobject is defined as the object to be perceived as a part of oneself. It provides psychological oxygen to the self, helping to escape from distorted dysfunctional representation and to replace them with correct and function ones. Then, if the healthy and functional God representation is so important, which one would be the case? In this paper, I proposed “selfobject God-representation” as the one needed for bruised people of modern society. The newly suggested God-representation should differ from the conventional, patriarchal and despotic representation of God, which has inflicted the human-being for a long time. The one we need for our era should embrace relatedness and diversity, as well as providing love and protection. And in my view, it is worth paying attention to the three sound characters of selfobject, which mirrors, becomes idealizing object and becomes the existence like the twin. That is because, in many respects, it is analogous to the nature of Trinity God who loves, protects and accompanies the human-being. Therefore, proposing selfobject God-representation would cast a new paradigm fitting the current era. And by this, we would be able to re-define the nature of God which is nurturing, embracing and cooperative, while it has been historically distorted as hierarchical, unilateral and patriarchal one. To explain about the selfobject God, I employed metaphorical theology as the main theological methodology. The nature of selfobject God is relational and is in various forms.

Despite excellent theological works on disability, current theological understanding of disability is insufficient to address the specific context of the parents of children with disabilities because the discourse is focused on those who are disabled, not on the parents. However, parents with children with disabilities merit deeper theological reflection because of the practical and emotional burden imposed on them. Also, the experiences of these parents have the potential to provide theology with a distinctive perspective that can enrich the body of theological knowledge about disability and all human beings. Parents themselves can provide intimate and experiential knowledge about the duality of “a world without disabilities” and “a world with disabilities.” For this reason, I conducted a narrative research interviewing mothers of children with disability and explored their lived disability theology. In this article, I introduced Alice’s narrative and provide my theological understanding of her lived disability theology. This article is my attempt to respond to the question “what is lived theology look like for parents of children with disability?” By using narrative inquiry, I explore Alice who is an artist herself and also a mother of a child with disability living in the US through narrative inquiry and offer practical theological interpretation. I argue that mother’s lived theology consists of multiple layers of different understanding of disability and that this multiplicity must be acknowledged as their living web of worldviews. In Part 1, I offer description of the concepts of “worldviews” that I propose in order to best make sense of Alice’s lived theology. In Part II, I introduce the notion of “living webs of worldviews,” appropriating Bonnie Miller McLemore’s “living human web”and Anton Boisen’s “living human document” to capture mothers’ lived theology. Finally, in Part III, I apply these concepts to analyze mothers’ lived theology more concretely. This framework is designed to evidence that mothers concurrently employ multiple worldviews regarding disabilities.

In this paper we try to search for the some implications of spiritual formation in Christian education, dealing with biblical foundations of spiritual formation, biblical content of spiritual maturity, spiritual formation of developmental stages, spiritual formation through spiritual discipline, and the integration of personality and Christian maturity. Spiritual formation is more than the transfer of knowledge from a teacher to a learner. Spiritual formation begins first in the changes of the heart, where being begins. These changes primarily bring about relational depth with God and others. The by-product, not the goal, is secondary change in behaviors and attitudes. The blessing of Christian maturity leads us to the fullness of Christ in our own lives. Additionally, it serves as a safeguard against the confusion and spiritual deceit we so often encounter in the religious world. By being formed to His image, we are made stable and sound in contrast to spiritual infants who cannot steady themselves when blown about by schemes and heresies. Spiritual maturity is the quality of being fully developed in spirit. For the Christian this development entails, more specifically, being conformed to the image of Christ. The formation process for spiritual maturity according to developmental stages offers unconditional love and an atmosphere of grace. Where there is grace, there is safety to fail without the threat of guilt or condemnation. Spiritual formation depends upon a place of safety and acceptance. Spiritual discipline is the exercises that carried out on a regular basis by individuals or groups in order to make habitual certain actions and attitudes that open one up to God or express a way of life given over to God. The aim of the spiritual disciplines is to create space for God in our lives. They are a way to acknowledge our commitment to Jesus by seeking on a daily basis to make his Way our way. Discipline is related to the purification of human behavior in general, and to a special academic division of knowledge and training learning in professional terms. An integrated personality is another way of expressing the concept of spiritual maturity. It is not His will for the new-born Christian to remain in a state of spiritual babyhood. Instead, God expects maturity. Each Christian is admonished to be filled with the fullness of God. The goal is the perfect man in Christ. Spiritual maturity is achieved by walking worthily as a child of God. We always try to spiritual maturity through spiritual formation by spiritual discipline.

This article seeks to reinterpret the meaning of the diaconate, an office widely recognized in the Protestant tradition, and to suggest ways Protestant churches can strengthen social communication and empathy by revitalizing the diaconate. The social credibility of Protestant churches in Korea continues to decline, and favorable perceptions toward Protestantism keep declining. During COVID-19, Protestant churches showed their inability to communicate socially and failed to convey Christian values and Protestant religious characteristics in a way that convinced members of society. The office of deacon has had an independent purpose in various church polity models since the church was established. The apostles combined serving their neighbors by living out the teachings of Christ's word, and when that became increasingly difficult, they divided their works into teaching and serving. Given this role differentiation, it makes sense to understand the two offices as complementary rather than hierarchical. In reality, however, the office of deacon is understood to be a supportive role of the office of elder. Restoring the office of deacon to its rightful place and helping deacons to fulfill their original position in their lives will enable the church to serve its neighbors concretely and engage in personal relationships. In this respect, restoring the diaconate can revitalize the church's engagement and response to society by allowing neighbors to experience Protestantism through personal relationships and by embracing the specific problems of their neighbors in the church so that the church can consider and understand them together. It is also worth noting that in the Korean church still having a culture of seniority, elders who are on average older than deacons and the 40s are the leading age group that serves as the backbone of Korean Presbyterian churches. In particular, the 40s occupy a bridge position in Korean society, bridging the gap between the older generation of the 60s and above, who drove economic development, and the more individualistic 30s of the post-democratic era. The restoration of the deaconship, centered in the 40s, can be expected to promote intergenerational dialogue in the church and bridge the gap with younger generations. It can also help the church become more responsive to cultural responses to modern society.

The objective of this research is to comprehensively expound upon the correlation between the portrayal of lamentation within Psalm 88 and the multifaceted experiences of individuals facing dying conditions arising from diverse incurable diseases. For this, this study delves deeply into the profound insights presented in Psalm 88, which poignantly portrays a distressing condition characterized by the imminent approach of death. Through a rigorous qualitative analysis of the text, the expressive language employed by the psalmist unveils the profound depths of their suffering and the impending reality of their demise, employing poignant phrases such as "troubled," "my life is drawing closer to Sheol," and "among the dead." The primary aim of this article is to explore the parallels between the lamentation depicted in Psalm 88 and the lived experiences of individuals confronting the challenges of dying conditions caused by incurable diseases. Furthermore, it underscores the crucial significance of pastoral care in providing solace and spiritual guidance to those undertaking the arduous journey towards death. Through meticulous descriptive qualitative research, primarily grounded in extensive literature studies, this article seeks to elucidate the pivotal role of pastoral care in offering support and assistance to individuals during their profound encounters with mortality.

This thesis studies the “life ethics” that Bonhoeffer thinks, focusing on the topic of “natural things” in his book “Ethics.” As Bonhoeffer researchers generally admit, It is not easy to organize his ethics and theology systematically. This is because Bonhoeffer's writings exist only as unfinished fragments, except for a few volumes. Therefore, while acknowledging these limitations, it is important for Bonhoeffer research to connect and describe the background of his life and the theological pieces that exist as fragments. The results revealed according to the method of this study are as follows. Bonhoeffer reinterpreted “the natural” through the gospel, that is, Christologically, in a unique way from the theologians at the time. However, this interpretation is not a personal and internal interpretation that simply stays in the church, but plays an active role in helping people who are threatened by Hitler's policy at the time. In a word, the “life ethics” directed by Bonhoeffer through “the natural” was a cry for the socially underprivileged in pain at the time, served, and at the same time served the function of resistance to the Hitler regime. From these results, it can be seen that Bonhoeffer still has a great lesson for the Korean church. First of all, the Korean church should grasp the themes that we have lost anew, just as Bonhoeffer took the theme of “natural things” for the socially suffering people, interpreted it anew, and served and resisted them. For example, although humanity is facing a climate crisis, there is still a lack of depth in the Korean church to harmonize creation with Christian faith and theology. Despite the efforts of theologians and ethicists, it is difficult to connect creation and faith in the field. Therefore, it is necessary to emphasize the interpretation that can be seen by connecting creation and faith again. Not only this, but the way Bonhoeffer pursued still gives many inspirations and practical challenges to the Korean church today.